On 5/15/12 9:25 AM, Thomas Witkowski wrote: > I made some comparisons of using umfpack, superlu, superlu_dist and > mumps to solve systems with sparse matrices arising from finite > element method. The size of the matrices range from around 50000 to > more than 3 million unknowns. I used 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 nodes to make > the benchmark. Now, I wonder that in all cases the sequential umfpack > was the fastest one. So even with 16 cores, superlu_dist and mumps are > slower. Can anybody of you confirm this observation? Are there any > other parallel direct solvers around which are more efficient? > > Thomas You should definitely try PARDISO. On shared memory machine is unbeatable by any kind of MPI-based solver, and offers functionality for both symmetric and non-symmetric matrices. There is a version available from MKL library.
If you're fine enough with symmetric matrices, then this thing - HSL MA87 - is even better than PARDISO. It's a commercial solver, but it's free for academic use. The only "problem" I see here is that both of them are difficult to use together with PETSc, since they're OMP-based. But difficult probably doesn't mean impossible. Cheers, Anton
