Computer Science Technical Reports
CS at VT

High Dimensional Homotopy Curve Tracking on a Shared Memory Multiprocessor

Allison, Donald C. S. and Irani, Kashmira M. and Ribbens, Calvin J. and Watson, Layne T. (1991) High Dimensional Homotopy Curve Tracking on a Shared Memory Multiprocessor. Technical Report TR-91-05, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

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Abstract

Results are reported for a series of experiments involving numerical curve tracking on a shared memory parallel computer. Several algorithms exist for finding zeros or fixed points of nonlinear systems of equations that are globally convergent for almost all starting points, i.e., with probability one. The essence of all such algorithms is the construction of an appropriate homotopy map and then the tracking of some smooth curve in the zero set of this homotopy map. HOMPACK is a mathematical software package implementing globally convergent homotopy algorithms with three different techniques for tracking a homotopy zero curve, and has separate routines for dense and sparse Jacobian matrices. A parallel version of HOMPACK is implemented on a shared memory parallel computer with various levels and degrees of parallelism (e.g., linear algebra, function and Jacobian matrix evaluation), and a detailed study is presented for each of these levels with respect to the speedup in execution time obtained with the parallelism, the time spent implementing the parallel code and the extra memory allocated by the parallel algorithm.

Item Type:Departmental Technical Report
Subjects:Computer Science > Historical Collection(Till Dec 2001)
ID Code:252
Deposited By:User autouser
Deposited On:05 December 2001