Hi, > so considering performance on MIC
can the library MAGMA be used as an alternate to Viennacl for PETSc or FEniCS?
No, there is no interface to MAGMA in PETSc yet. Contributions are always welcome, yet it is not our priority to come up with an interface of our own. I don't think it will provide any substantial benefits, though, because there is no magic one can apply to overcome the memory wall.
http://www.nics.tennessee.edu/files/pdf/hpcss/04_03_LinearAlgebraPar.pdf (from slide 37 onwards) MAGMA seems to have sparse version which i think is doing all that any sparse non linear solver can do.. MAGMA-sparse.. will this be helpful in using with MIC
This depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking a maximizing FLOP rates for a fixed algorithm, then MAGMA may help you if it happens to provide an implementation for this particular algorithm. However, if you're looking for a way to minimize time-to-solution for a given problem, then it's usually better to build a good preconditioner with the many options PETSc provides, such as field-split and multigrid preconditioners. Purely CPU-based implementations usually still beat accelerator-based approaches on larger scale, simply because it allows you to use better algorithms rather than throwing massive parallelism at it, which severely restricts your options. If you really want to play with accelerators in PETSc, use GPUs (higher memory bandwidth), not MIC.
Best regards, Karli
