Title: An inherently parallel method for solving discretized diffusion equations
Abstract: A Monte Carlo approach to solving linear systems of equations is being investigated in the context of the solution of discretized diffusion equations. While the technique was originally devised decades ago, changes in computer architectures (namely, massively parallel machines) have driven the authors to revisit this technique. There are a number of potential advantages to this approach: (1) Analog Monte Carlo techniques are inherently parallel; this is not necessarily true to today's more advanced linear equation solvers (multigrid, conjugate gradient, etc.); (2) Some forms of this technique are adaptive in that they allow the user to specify locations in the problem where resolution is of particular importance and to concentrate the work at those locations; and (3) These techniques permit the solution of very large systems of equations in that matrix elements need not be stored. The user could trade calculational speed for storage if elements of the matrix are calculated on the fly. The goal of this study is to compare the parallel performance of Monte Carlo linear solvers to that of a more traditional parallelized linear solver. The authors observe the linear speedup that they expect from the Monte Carlo algorithm, given that there is no domain decompositionmore » to cause significant communication overhead. Overall, PETSc outperforms the Monte Carlo solver for the test problem. The PETSc parallel performance improves with larger numbers of unknowns for a given number of processors. Parallel performance of the Monte Carlo technique is independent of the size of the matrix and the number of processes. They are investigating modifications to the scheme to accommodate matrix problems with positive off-diagonal elements. They are also currently coding an on-the-fly version of the algorithm to investigate the solution of very large linear systems.« less
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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