There is another sparse direct solver that PETSc supports: PaStix. You can try it by --download-pastix.
Xiangdong On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:34 AM, Anton Popov <popov at uni-mainz.de> wrote: > 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 >
