Lapack
In this exercise you are going to compare the textbook Cholesky factorization routine with Lapack implementations of the same algorithm. The Cholesky factorization is the first step when solving Ax=b where A is a symmetric and positive definite matrix.
The LU-factorization of a square matrix A is the product A = LU where L is lower triangular (zeros above the diagonal) and U is upper triangular. When A is symmetric and positive definite it is possible to write A = CCT where C is lower triangular and where T denotes transpose.
One way to write the Cholesky factorization algorithm (using Matlab notation) is shown below. The lower triangle of the original matrix A is replaced by the Cholesky factor C (it is common to replace things like this in order to save space).
n = length(A);
for k=1:n
A(k, k) = sqrt(A(k, k) - sum(A(k, 1:k-1).^2));
for i = k+1:n
A(i, k) = (A(i, k) - sum(A(i, 1:k-1) .* A(k, 1:k-1))) / A(k, k);
end
end
For more details, see (almost) any standard textbook in numerical
analysis.
The factorization is available in Matlab using the command chol
.
Implement the algorithm above (you may replace the sums by loops) and run it on matrices of order 50, 100, 150, ..., 1200 in Fortran or C. How many floating point operations (additions and multiplications) are used (just look at the algorithm above and count them, and express the number in terms of the dimension n)? How many Gflop/s to you get (make a plot using Matlab)?
Do the same thing using the Lapack routine dpotrf
from Lapack
in the following three ways:
Fetch the necessary Lapack-routines (Fortran-versions)
from Netlib (look under Browse).
Use
the (slow) unoptimized BLAS in this first test. Note that it is easy
to fetch just the necessary routines (you do not have to fetch the
whole Lapack-library and all of BLAS).
Comment 2008-04-29: it is
slightly harder this year (and following years) since "Include (unoptimized) BLAS routines?"
does not seem to work any longer. Is used to work however. For that
reason I have put some of the hard-to-find routines on the student
system. Look under /chalmers/groups/thomas_math/HPC/Lapack
. You must still fetch dpotrf (to practice
using Netlib).
Comment 2012-03-27: there is, however, BLAS.
Note: this part will be used in the next assignment as well.
To see how important it is with fast BLAS, you should test
an excellent BLAS-library GotoBLAS2. Fetch and unpack the
package yourself (it is part of the assignment). Then read 01Readme.txt and proceed (I used gfortran
for the Fortran source). Build a single threaded library to make the
comparisons fair (but you can test multi-threaded versions too if you
want). Note that GotoBLAS2 contains the necessary Lapack-routines as well. Here is an article about the person, Kazushige Goto, behind the routines.
Update 2011-04-12 and 2012-03-29:
When you
compile on the student machine, you need to specify a target
architecture, otherwise the named constant RPREFETCHSIZE will be undefined in kernel/x86_64/gemm_ncopy_4.S. So, when you give the make-command, add TARGET=NEHALEM (in addition to your other make-options). If you have problems with using ifort, change the Fortran-compiler adding FORTRAN=gfortran and F_COMPILER=gfortran when you run make; make sure you do not have ifort in your Linux-path. You want to use BINARY=64 as well.
Update 2011-04-14:
some students have problems linking with the library and I do not know
why. If you want to proceed with this lab (until you fix your own
library) you can link with the library I produced. You find it here:
/chalmers/groups/thomas_math/HPC/libgoto2_nehalem-r1.13.so
You also need to read about libraries and the dynamic linker, in the handouts.
/usr/lib64/liblapack.so
that comes
with Linux distribution. (It is sufficient to link with -llapack, you do not have to supply a link-path.) What do you think of the
performance? (Note that the performance depends on what Linux-version you are using.) Make some nice plots where it is easy to compare all
the tests (so do not plot one curve per page)
A Fortran-hint. See the pdf-file "Introduction to C, Fortran 90, FORTRAN 77, tcsh and bash" under the Diary as well. This pdf-file contains a similar discussion for C.
One can use the following theorem to construct a symmetric and positive definite matrix:
Theorem: if A is symmetric and
A(k, k) > |A(k, 1)| + |A(k, 2)| + ... + |A(k, k-1)| + |A(k, k+1)| + ... + |A(k, n)|, k = 1, 2, ..., n,
then A is positive definite.
So taking A(k, k) = 1 and small off-diagonal elements will work (do not take zeros).