PARASOL (1996-1999)

• Test data from the PARASOL project is here.

Project summary

An industrial requirement is to be able to efficiently solve large sparse linear equation systems. Many codes in CFD and CMD use either direct solvers or iterative solvers with preconditioning - both to solve large coarse matrices. Simple iterative methods such as CG and SOR do not work for stability reasons.

Solving such large systems in reasonable time requires the use of MPP systems. Therefore, message passing versions of direct sparse solvers are needed. Up to now, however, no generally available library of scalable parallel sparse matrix solvers or preconditioners exists.

The aim of the PARASOL project (EU ESPRIT IV LTR Project No. 20160) was to develop new parallel algorithms for direct solution of sparse systems of equations and for their preconditioning. These algorithms were implemented as portable prototypes and integrated into the PARASOL library.

A further industrial requirement was that the PARASOL library must contain interfaces to domain decomposition algorithms, utilities for data sorting, symbolic factorization and mapping algorithms.

Industrial developers played a key role in the project and were active in the specification of the library as well as in the evaluation of the prototype solvers.

Objectives

To develop sparse matrix algorithms according to the needs of the industrial partners.

To implement portable prototypes of these solvers and to demonstrate these working on HPC systems (IBM, Meiko, Parsytec, SGI, workstation cluster, all under MPI).

To specify an open library interface to the PARASOL library.

To integrate the solvers and additional utilities into the PARASOL library (public domain).

To establish a continuous library support.

To use a state-of-the-art parallel programming environment.

To evaluate PARASOL solvers and utilities by industrial application developers.

Partners

Leading European research organisations with a track-record in the development of parallel solvers and applications (CERFACS, ENSEEIHT-IRIT, GMD, ONERA, RAL, Parallab).

Industrial code developers who defined the requirements for PARASOL and use its results (DNV, INPRO, MacNeal-Schwendler, Polyflow).

Two leading European HPC software companies exploited the project results and provided state-of-the-art programming development tools (GENIAS, PALLAS).

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