Parallel Implementations of RCM Algorithm for Bandwidth Reduction of Sparse Matrices

Abstract

The Reverse Cuthill-McKee (RCM) algorithm is a well-known heuristic for reordering sparse matrices. It is typically used to speed up the computation of sparse linear systems of equations. This paper describes two parallel approaches for the RCM algorithm as well as an optimized version of each one based on some proposed enhancements. The first one exploits a strategy for reducing lazy threads, while the second one makes use of a static bucket array as the main data structure and suppress some steps performed by the original algorithm. These related changes led to outstanding reordering time results and significant bandwidth reductions. The performance of two algorithms is compared with the respective implementation made available by Boost library. The OpenMP framework is used for supporting the parallelism and both versions of the algorithm are tested with large sparse and structural symmetric matrices.