PARDISO: a high-performance serial and parallel sparse linear solver in semiconductor device simulation

Abstract

The package PARDISO is a high-performance, robust and easy to use software for solving large sparse symmetric or structurally symmetric linear systems of equations on shared memory multiprocessors. PARDISO uses a combination of left- and right-looking Level-3 BLAS supernode techniques to exploit pipelining parallelism. It delivers up to 960 Mflop/s on COMPAQ Alpha ES40 (667 MHz) for irregular problems and sparse matrix factorization has been clocked up at a speedup of 7 on an 8-node SGI Origin 2000. The paper gives an overview of the algorithm, performance results and the integration of the solver into complex industrial simulation tools. Finally, an example is discussed inherently (due to the design goal) producing linear systems close to singularity.