This paper reports the results of an empirical comparison
of a set of commonly used software packages for
solving general sparse systems of linear equations. The packages
included in this study are MUMPS, S+, SPOOLES, SuperLU, UMFPACK,
and WSMP. The study includes results from distributed-memory
and shared-memory parallel versions of the packages, where applicable.
At the time of writing this report, MUMPS, S+, SPOOLES, and SuperLU
had MPI-based distributed-memory parallel versions, SPOOLES and
SuperLU had Pthreads-based shared-memory versions, and
UMFPACK and WSMP included only single-CPU codes. All experiments
were conducted on a 24-CPU IBM RS6000 S/80. To the best of our
knowledge, this is a first extensive comparison of all these
software packages on the same hardware and the same set of
real industrial problems. Therefore, we hope that this report will
serve as a useful reference for practitioners who are often faced with
the decision of choosing one of the packages for their applications.
By: Anshul Gupta, Yanto Muliadi (Stanford University)
Published in: RC21862 in 2000
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