UMFpackLU backslash operator involving multiple RHS

General Usage
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1

Hello,

I was experimenting with out-of-core linear solvers and found that most of my time was spent in computations of the form
F\x

where F=lufact(A), A is a sparse matrix, and x is many column vectors.

It seems a straightforward way to parallelize is over the columns of x. I would think UMFpack should have an option for this, but in Julia the result seems to be single threaded.

I see the following issue on GitHub:
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/19500

but it’s over a year old.

Is there a workaround to get this to parallelize over the columns of x?

Thank you

2

Did you try something like Andreas’ example at the end of the issue you mentioned? This minimal version works
for me on Julia 0.6.2:

using Base.Threads

function unsafe_solver!(X,F::Base.SparseArrays.UMFPACK.UmfpackLU,B)
    @threads for j in 1:size(B,2)
        A_ldiv_B!(view(X,:,j), F, view(B,:,j))
    end
    X
end

(unsafe because of lack of sanity checks.)
I observe about 5x speedup for 8 threads on 8 cores.

2 Likes
3

Thank you this was exactly what I needed!

I did originally try this but I didn’t include using Base.Threads so it complained about my @threads macro. I am trying this now and on surface it appears to be working. The code takes a while to run, hopefully this helps!

Thank you.