International audience

Dense matrix multiplication involving a symmetric input matrix (SYMM) is implemented in reference distributed-memory codes with the same data distribution as its general analogue (GEMM). We show that, when the symmetric matrix is dominant, such a 2D block-cyclic (2D BC) scheme leads to a lower arithmetic intensity (AI) of SYMM than that of GEMM by a factor of 2. We propose alternative data distributions preserving the memory benefit of SYMM of storing only half of the matrix while achieving up to the same AI as GEMM. We also show that, in the case we can afford the same memory footprint as GEMM, SYMM can achieve a higher AI. We propose a task-based design of SYMM independent of the data distribution. This design allows for scalable A-stationary SYMM with which all discussed data distributions, may they be very irregular, can be easily assessed. We have integrated the resulting code in a reduction dimension algorithm involving a randomized singular value decomposition dominated by SYMM. An experimental study shows a compelling impact on performance.

Task-based programming models have succeeded in gaining the interest of the high-performance mathematical software community because they relieve part of the burden of developing and implementing distributed-memory parallel algorithms in an efficient and portable way.In increasingly larger, more heterogeneous clusters of computers, these models appear as a way to maintain and enhance more complex algorithms. However, task-based programming models lack the flexibility and the features that are necessary to express in an elegant and compact way scalable algorithms that rely on advanced communication patterns. We show that the Sequential Task Flow paradigm can be extended to write compact yet efficient and scalable routines for linear algebra computations. Although, this work focuses on dense General Matrix Multiplication, the proposed features enable the implementation of more complex algorithms. We describe the implementation of these features and of the resulting GEMM operation. Finally, we present an experimental analysis on two homogeneous supercomputers showing that our approach is competitive up to 32,768 CPU cores with state-of-the-art libraries and may outperform them for some problem dimensions. Although our code can use GPUs straightforwardly, we do not deal with this case because it implies other issues which are out of the scope of this work.