There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

We describe the University of Florida Sparse Matrix Collection, a large and actively growing set of sparse matrices that arise in real applications The Collection is widely used by the numerical linear algebra community for the development and performance evaluation of sparse matrix algorithms It allows for robust and repeatable experiments: robust because performance results with artificially generated matrices can be misleading, and repeatable because matrices are curated and made publicly available in many formats Its matrices cover a wide spectrum of domains, include those arising from problems with underlying 2D or 3D geometry (as structural engineering, computational fluid dynamics, model reduction, electromagnetics, semiconductor devices, thermodynamics, materials, acoustics, computer graphics/vision, robotics/kinematics, and other discretizations) and those that typically do not have such geometry (optimization, circuit simulation, economic and financial modeling, theoretical and quantum chemistry, chemical process simulation, mathematics and statistics, power networks, and other networks and graphs) We provide software for accessing and managing the Collection, from MATLAB™, Mathematica™, Fortran, and C, as well as an online search capability Graph visualization of the matrices is provided, and a new multilevel coarsening scheme is proposed to facilitate this task

The university of Florida sparse matrix collection

Full-waveform inversion FWI is a challenging data-fitting procedure based on full-wavefield modeling to extract quantitative information from seismograms. High-resolution imaging at half the propagated wavelength is expected. Recent advances in high-performance computing and multifold/multicomponent wide-aperture and wide-azimuth acquisitions make 3D acoustic FWI feasible today. Key ingredients of FWI are an efficient forward-modeling engine and a local differential approach, in which the gradient and the Hessian operators are efficiently estimated. Local optimization does not, however, prevent convergence of the misfit function toward local minima because of the limited accuracy of the starting model, the lack of low frequencies, the presence of noise, and the approximate modeling of the wave-physics complexity. Different hierarchical multiscale strategiesaredesignedtomitigatethenonlinearityandill-posedness of FWI by incorporating progressively shorter wavelengths in the parameter space. Synthetic and real-data case studies address reconstructing various parameters, from VP and VS velocities to density, anisotropy, and attenuation. This review attempts to illuminate the state of the art of FWI. Crucial jumps, however, remain necessary to make it as popular as migration techniques. The challenges can be categorized as 1 building accurate starting models with automatic procedures and/or recording low frequencies, 2 defining new minimization criteria to mitigate the sensitivity of FWI to amplitude errors and increasing the robustness of FWI when multiple parameter classes are estimated, and 3 improving computational efficiency by data-compression techniquestomake3DelasticFWIfeasible.

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An overview of full-waveform inversion in exploration geophysics

This is a short presentation of the freefem++ software. In Section 1, we recall most of the characteristics of the software, In Section 2, we recall how to to build the weak form of a partial differential equation (PDE) from the strong form. In the 3 last sections, we present different examples and tools to illustrated the power of the software. First we deal with mesh adaptation for problems in two and three dimension, second, we solve numerically a problem with phase change and natural convection, and the finally to show the possibilities for HPC we solve a Laplace equation by a Schwarz domain decomposition problem on parallel computer.

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New development in freefem

In this paper, we analyze the main features and discuss the tuning of the algorithms for the direct solution of sparse linear systems on distributed memory computers developed in the context of a long term European research project. The algorithms use a multifrontal approach and are especially designed to cover a large class of problems. The problems can be symmetric positive definite, general symmetric, or unsymmetric matrices, both possibly rank deficient, and they can be provided by the user in several formats. The algorithms achieve high performance by exploiting parallelism coming from the sparsity in the problem and that available for dense matrices. The algorithms use a dynamic distributed task scheduling technique to accommodate numerical pivoting and to allow the migration of computational tasks to lightly loaded processors. Large computational tasks are divided into subtasks to enhance parallelism. Asynchronous communication is used throughout the solution process to efficiently overlap communication with computation.
We illustrate our design choices by experimental results obtained on an SGI Origin 2000 and an IBM SP2 for test matrices provided by industrial partners in the PARASOL project.

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A Fully Asynchronous Multifrontal Solver Using Distributed Dynamic Scheduling

We consider the problem of designing a dynamic scheduling strategy that takes into account both workload and memory information in the context of the parallel multifrontal factorization. The originality of our approach is that we base our estimations (work and memory) on a static optimistic scenario during the analysis phase. This scenario is then used during the factorization phase to constrain the dynamic decisions that compute fully irregular partitions in order to better balance the workload. We show that our new scheduling algorithm significantly improves both the memory behaviour and the factorization time. We give experimental results for large challenging real-life 3D problems on 64 and 128 processors.

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Hybrid scheduling for the parallel solution of linear systems

Multifrontal parallel distributed symmetric and unsymmetric solvers

We present a finite-difference frequency-domain method for 3D visco-acoustic wave propagation modeling. In the frequency domain, the underlying numerical problem is the resolution of a large sparse system of linear equations whose right-hand side term is the source. This system is solved with a massively parallel direct solver. We first present an optimal 3D finite-difference stencil for frequency-domain modeling. The method is based on a parsimonious staggered-grid method. Differential operators are discretized with second-order accurate staggered-grid stencils on different rotated coordinate systems to mitigate numerical anisotropy. An antilumped mass strategy is implemented to minimize numerical dispersion. The stencil incorporates 27 grid points and spans two grid intervals. Dispersion analysis shows that four grid points per wavelength provide accurate simulations in the 3D domain. To assess the feasibility of the method for frequency-domain full-waveform inversion, we computed simulations in the 3D SEG/EAGE overthrust model for frequencies 5, 7, and 10 Hz. Results confirm the huge memory requirement of the factorization (several hundred Figabytes) but also the CPU efficiency of the resolution phase (few seconds per shot). Heuristic scalability analysis suggests that the memory complexity of the factorization is O(35N(4)) for a N-3 grid. Our method may provide a suitable tool to perform frequency-domain full-waveform inversion using a large distributed-memory platform. Further investigation is still necessary to assess more quantitatively the respective merits and drawbacks of time- and frequency-domain modeling of wave propagation to perform 3D full-waveform inversion.

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3D finite-difference frequency-domain modeling of visco-acoustic wave propagation using a massively parallel direct solver: A feasibility study

MUMPS is a public domain software package for the multifrontal solution of large sparse linear systems on distributed memory computers. The matrices can be symmetric positive definite, general symmetric, or unsymmetric, and possibly rank deficient. MUMPS exploits parallelism coming from the sparsity in the matrix and parallelism available for dense matrices. Additionally, large computational tasks are divided into smaller subtasks to enhance parallelism. MUMPS uses a distributed dynamic scheduling technique that allows numerical pivoting and the migration of computational tasks to lightly loaded processors. Asynchronous communication is used to overlap communication with computation. In this paper, we report on recently integrated features and illustrate the present performance of the solver on an SGI Origin 2000 and a CRAY T3E.

Jean-Yves L'Excellent

Papers

A Fully Asynchronous Multifrontal Solver Using Distributed Dynamic Scheduling

Hybrid scheduling for the parallel solution of linear systems

Multifrontal parallel distributed symmetric and unsymmetric solvers

3D finite-difference frequency-domain modeling of visco-acoustic wave propagation using a massively parallel direct solver: A feasibility study

MUMPS: A General Purpose Distributed Memory Sparse Solver