Alfredo Buttari, Jack Dongarra, Parry Husbands, Jakub Kurzak, and Katherine Yelick (2007)
Multithreading for Synchronization Tolerance in Matrix Factorization
In: Proceedings of the SciDAC 2007 Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, Journal of Physics: Conference Series.
Physical constraints such as power, leakage and pin bandwidth are currently driving the HPC industry to produce systems with unprecedented levels of concurrency. In these parallel systems, synchronization and memory operations are becoming considerably more expensive than before. In this work we study parallel matrix factorization codes and conclude that they need to be re-engineered to avoid unnecessary (and expensive) synchronization. We propose the use of multithreading combined with intelligent schedulers and implement representative algorithms in this style. Our results indicate that this strategy can significantly outperform traditional codes.