Fast Parallel Iterative Matrix Diagonalization

Windsor Hsu, Hong Yun Wang, Bernd Pfrommer

Abstract:

The selfconsistent solution of an effective single-particle Schrödinger equation describing the electrons in a crystal can be done by expanding the solution into a finite Fourier sum, and finding some of the smallest eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors of a large hermitian matrix.

We present an approach to solve this eigenvalue problem which is based on a conjugate gradient minimization scheme, and is suitable for parallelization. We compare various algorithms, and discuss the performance of one of them based on our implementation on the NCSA's SGI Power Challenge, which is a bus-based shared memory multiprocessor.

We find that with our data layout, the 3D Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) involved in matrix-vector multiplies is the most difficult part to parallelize, and limits the speedup for small problem sizes. For larger problem sizes, the speedup becomes better because operations requiring little communication dominate the FFT.





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