Great! Then I have a follow-up question:

My goal is to be able to load the full matrix X from disk, while at the same 
time in parallel, performing computations on the submatrices that have already 
been loaded. Essentially, I want to think of X as a block matrix (where the 
blocks are horizontal, spanning the full width of the matrix), where I’m 
loading one block at a time, and all the blocks that have already been loaded 
are combined using MatCreateNest, so that I can make computations on that 
portion of the matrix.

In this scenario, every process needs to be simultaneously loading the next 
block of X, and perform computations on the previously loaded portion. My 
strategy is for each MPI process to spawn a thread for data loading (so that 
the memory between the process and the thread is shared), while the process 
does computations. My concern is that the data loading thread may be using up 
computational resources of the processor, even though it is mainly doing IO. 
Will this be an issue? What is the best way to minimize the cpu time of this 
parallel data loading scheme?

Thanks,
Michal.


> Wiadomość napisana przez Matthew Knepley <[email protected]> w dniu 
> 24.05.2017, o godz. 04:55:
> 
> On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 1:09 AM, Michal Derezinski <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to be able to perform matrix operations on several contiguous 
> submatrices of a full matrix, without allocating the memory redundantly for 
> the submatrices (in addition to the memory that is already allocated for the 
> full matrix).
> I tried using MatGetSubMatrix, but this function appears to allocate the 
> additional memory.
> 
> The other way I found to do this is to create the smallest submatrices I need 
> first, then use MatCreateNest to combine them into bigger ones (including the 
> full matrix).
> The documentation of MatCreateNest seems to indicate that it does not 
> allocate additional memory for storing the new matrix.
> Is this the right approach, or is there a better one?
> 
> Yes, that is the right approach.
> 
>   Thanks,
> 
>     Matt
>  
> Thanks,
> Michal Derezinski.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments 
> is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments 
> lead.
> -- Norbert Wiener
> 
> http://www.caam.rice.edu/~mk51/ <http://www.caam.rice.edu/~mk51/>

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