| HPL - A Portable Implementation of the High-Performance Linpack
Benchmark for Distributed-Memory Computers |   | 
 
HPL is  a software  package  that solves  a (random)
dense  linear  system  in  double  precision   (64  bits)  arithmetic
on  distributed-memory  computers.    It  can  thus  be  regarded  as
a portable as well as  freely available  implementation  of the  High
Performance Computing Linpack Benchmark.
The algorithm used  by HPL  can be summarized by the
following keywords:  Two-dimensional  block-cyclic data  distribution
- Right-looking variant  of  the  LU  factorization  with row partial
pivoting  featuring  multiple  look-ahead depths  -  Recursive  panel
factorization  with  pivot  search  and  column  broadcast combined -
Various  virtual  panel  broadcast topologies  -  bandwidth  reducing
swap-broadcast  algorithm -  backward  substitution  with  look-ahead
of depth 1.
The  HPL package  provides  a testing and timing program  to quantify
the  accuracy of  the obtained solution  as  well as
the time it took to compute it. The best performance
achievable by this software on your system depends on a large variety
of factors.  Nonetheless,  with some restrictive assumptions  on  the
interconnection  network,   the  algorithm  described  here  and  its
attached implementation  are scalable  in  the sense
that their parallel efficiency is maintained  constant  with  respect
to the per processor memory usage.
The HPL software package requires  the  availibility
on your system of an implementation of the  Message Passing Interface
MPI (1.1 compliant).
An implementation of either the Basic Linear Algebra
Subprograms   BLAS  or   the   Vector  Signal  Image
Processing Library VSIPL is also needed.
Machine-specific as well as generic implementations of
MPI, the
BLAS and
VSIPL are available  for a large
variety of systems.
Acknowledgements: This work was  supported  in  part
by  a  grant  from  the  Department  of  Energy's   Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory  and  Los  Alamos  National  Laboratory
as   part  of  the   ASCI  Projects   contract  numbers  B503962  and
12187-001-00 4R.
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Innovative Computing Laboratory
last revised September 10, 2008
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file    hpl-2.0.tar.gz
for     HPL - A Portable Implementation of the High-Performance Linpack
,       Benchmark for Distributed-Memory Computers 
by      Antoine Petitet, Clint Whaley, Jack Dongarra, Andy Cleary
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