Comment on “Efficient Secure Outsourcing of Large-Scale Sparse Linear Systems of Equations”

This paper presents a novel hardware solution for solving sparse matrices using emulation technology. The proposed solution introduces a bio-inspired technique, which is Genetic Algorithm (GA) to solve the sparse system of linear equations (SLEs). The proposed solution can be used with any physical system that can be modeled as SLEs. Computations involved in Finite Element Method (FEM) consume too much time, which affects the final time-to-market value. Profiling shows that the most time-consuming part in the simulation process is the solver part which is responsible for solving the resultant SLEs generated from the FEM. The total number of equations may reach thousands or millions of linear equations. Hardware implementation of GA and making a good use of parallelism in implementing the architecture accelerate the time taken by the solver part. Solving the system by classical numerical methods, such as conjugate gradient (CG) implemented in software is performed sequentially, here the architecture allows the parallelism in performing GA operators, such as selection, crossover, and mutation. The parallelism in the proposed architecture is the superiority point which we rely on. The results show that our proposed method to solve the SLEs outperforms the classical CG software implementation on run time and number of equations.

During the past few years, algorithmic improvements alone have reduced the time required for the direct solution of unsymmetric sparse systems of linear equations by almost an order of magnitude. This paper compares the performance of some well-known software packages for solving general sparse systems. In particular, it demonstrates the consistently high level of performance achieved by WSMP---the most recent of such solvers. It compares the various algorithmic components of these solvers and discusses their impact on solver performance. Our experiments show that the algorithmic choices made in WSMP enable it to run more than twice as fast as the best among similar solvers and that WSMP can factor some of the largest sparse matrices available from real applications in only a few seconds on a 4-CPU workstation. Thus, the combination of advances in hardware and algorithms makes it possible to solve those general sparse linear systems quickly and easily that might have been considered too large until recently.

This paper describes an efficient approach to sparse matrix factorization on vector supercomputers. The approach is suitable for application domains like circuit simulation that require the repeated direct solution of unsymmetric sparse linear systems of equations with identical zero-nonzero structure. An Overlap-Scatter data structure is used to represent the sparse matrix, enabling the use of multiple operand access modes to achieve higher performance than earlier proposed approaches. The superior performance of the new solver is demonstrated using a number of matrices derived from circuit simulation runs.

Computer subroutines for solving large sparse systems of linear equations usually involve fairly complicated data structures and storage management. In most cases, the user of such subroutines simply wants top solve his problem and does not have to understand how the storage management is done, or how the matrix components are stored. Thus software for solving sparse systems of linear equations should be designed in such a way that it can insulate the user from these considerations, while still allowing the software to be used in a variety of ways.

A procedure for symmetric matrix updating subject to a linear equation and retaining any sparsity present in the original matrix is derived. The main feature of this procedure is the reduction of the problem to the solution of an n dimensional sparse system of linear equations. The matrix of this system is shown to be symmetric and positive definite. The method depends on the Frobenius matrix norm. Comments are made on the difficulties of extending the technique so that it uses more general norms, the main points being shown by a numerical example.

We present a class of new preconditioners based on the incomplete Givens orthogonalization (IGO) methods for solving large sparse systems of linear equations. In the new methods, instead of dropping entries and accepting fill-ins according to the magnitudes of values and the sparsity patterns, we adopt a diagonal compensation strategy, in which the dropped entries are re-used by adding to the main diagonal entries of the same rows of the incomplete upper-triangular factors, possibly after suitable relaxation treatments, so that certain constraints on the preconditioning matrices are further satisfied. This strategy can make the computed preconditioning matrices possess certain desired properties, e.g., having the same weighted row sums as the target matrices. Theoretical analysis shows that these modified incomplete Givens orthogonalization (MIGO) methods can preserve certain useful properties of the original matrix, and numerical results are used to verify the stability, the accuracy, and the efficiency of the MIGO methods employed to precondition the Krylov subspace iteration methods such as GMRES. Both theoretical and numerical studies show that the MIGO methods may have the potential to present high-quality preconditioners for large sparse nonsymmetric matrices.

Supernode pivoting for unsymmetric matrices coupled with supernode partitioning and asynchronous computation can achieve high gigaflop rates for parallel sparse LU factorization on shared memory parallel computers. The progress in weighted graph matching algorithms helps to extend these concepts further and prepermutation of rows is used to place large matrix entries on the diagonal. Supernode pivoting allows dynamical interchanges of columns and rows during the factorization process. The BLAS-3 level efficiency is retained. An enhanced left-right looking scheduling scheme is uneffected and results in good speedup on SMP machines without increasing the operation count. These algorithms have been integrated into the recent unsymmetric version of the PARDISO solver. Experiments demonstrate that a wide set of unsymmetric linear systems can be solved and high performance is consistently achieved for large sparse unsymmetric matrices from real world applications.

In recent years a number of solvers for the direct solution of large sparse symmetric linear systems of equations have been developed. These include solvers that are designed for the solution of positive definite systems as well as those that are principally intended for solving indefinite problems. In this study, we use performance profiles as a tool for evaluating and comparing the performance of serial sparse direct solvers on an extensive set of symmetric test problems taken from a range of practical applications.

This paper proposes an image fusion algorithm based on a sparse linear equation system, which uses local extreme of high resolution image and intensity of multi-spectral image to construct the system. Based on this sparse system, the multi-scale image decomposition algorithm can be implemented. This algorithm extracts the details of the high-resolution image and integrates with the multi-spectral information to derive the fused image.

In this paper, an FPGA-based single precision floating point hybrid iterative architecture for solving a linear system of equations is proposed. The novel architecture implements Gauss-Seidel method using a Jacobi method based building block. The design takes advantage of the fast convergence of Gauss-Seidel Method conflated with parallel, pipelined architecture of Jacobi Iterative solver resulting in a much efficient architecture with acceptable hardware augmentation. The whole design has been implemented in Verilog HDL, having Virtex 7 XCV2000T as targeted device. Other design optimizations include using modified high-speed radix 4 multiplier and optimized high-speed 2's complementer. The efficacy of the design is tested and implemented in solving nonsingular, exactly determined and strictly diagonally dominant coefficient matrix based dense and sparse linear system of equations with different number of variables. The design results in reduced number of iterations and equivalent speedups are presented, which are calculated factoring in, the increased delay effects.

We present a unified anisotropic geometric diffusion PDE model for smoothing (fairing) out noise both in triangulated two-manifold surface meshes inIR3and functions defined on these surface meshes, while enhancing curve features on both by careful choice of an anisotropic diffusion tensor. We combine theC1limit representation of Loop's subdivision for triangular surface meshes and vector functions on the surface mesh with the established diffusion model to arrive at a discretized version of the diffusion problem in the spatial direction. The time direction discretization then leads to a sparse linear system of equations. Iteratively solving the sparse linear system yields a sequence of faired (smoothed) meshes as well as faired functions.

Image acquisition of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be accelerated by using multiple receiving coils simultaneously. The problem of reconstructing an unaliased image from partially sampled k-space data can be formulated as a large system of sparse linear equations. The k-space sparse matrix (kSPA) algorithm proposes to solve the system of equations by finding a sparse approximate inverse. This algorithm has been shown to accelerate the image reconstruction for a large number of coils. The original kSPA algorithm requires knowledge of coil sensitivities. Here, we propose and demonstrate an auto-calibrated kSPA algorithm that does not require the explicit computation of the coil sensitivity maps. We have also shown that calibration data, in principle, can be acquired at any region of k-space. This property applies to arbitrary sampling trajectories and all reconstruction algorithms based on k-space. In practice, because of its higher SNR, calibration data acquired at the center of k-space performed more favorably. Such auto-calibration can be advantageous in cases where an accurate sensitivity map is difficult to obtain.

It is known that the main computational costs in the FEM implementation are computing the global system of linear equations (material response computation and stiffness matrix ensemble) and its solution. With the aim of speeding up the total solving boundary value problem time with the help of the developed solver, algorithms of the parallel stiffness matrix ensemble and the system of linear equations solution were implemented. In this paper the results of using GPU to accelerate computations related to the solution of direct boundary value problems of crystal plasticity are present. The existing algorithms for solving the sparse systems of linear equations and parallel ensemble of the global stiffness matrix were implemented on both the CPU and GPU. As a result, a total acceleration of up to 10 times was obtained compared to the software implementation on the CPU.

Element-by-element iterative solution methods have been shown to be effective for solving large, sparse linear systems of equations with a positive definite stiffness matrix. In this paper the iterative method GMRES will be described. This solution method is also suited for solving nonsymmetric systems of equations. As acceleration technique an element-by-element preconditioner has been employed. Attention is focused mainly on the convergence behaviour of the method. The calculations described in this paper have been performed with the finite element package DIANA.

The DEFLATED-GMRES(m, k) method is one of the major iterative solvers for the large sparse linear systems of equations, x = b. This algorithm assembles a preconditioner adaptively for the GMRES(m) method based on eigencomponents gathered from the Arnoldi process during iterations. It is usually known that if a restarted GMRES(m) method is used to solve linear systems of equations, the information of the smallest eigencomponents is lost at each restart and the super-linear convergence may also be lost. In this paper, we propose an adaptive procedure that combines the DEFLATED-GMRES(m, k) algorithm and the determination of a restart frequency automatically. It is shown that a new algorithm combining elements of both will reduce the negative effects of the restarted procedure. The numerical experiments are presented on three test problems by using the MIMD parallel machine AP3000. From these numerical results, we show that the proposed algorithm leads to faster convergence than the conventional DEFLATED-GMRES(m, k) method. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.