State-of-the-art Parallel Sparse Simultaneous Linear Equation Solvers

The ability to calculate solutions to huge sets of simultaneous equations quickly is critical to the success of many physical simulations. This project is concerned with discovering how this problem is solved by the best parallel software available. A parallel software library called PETSc represents the state of the art in attempts to tackle this problem. A rudimentary package named IterSol that was developed by students over a period of a few months is compared to PETSc to learn about what factors decide a parallel linear simultaneous equation solver’s quality. An introduction to many important areas related directly to the problem of matrix solution is also provided to give the reader a framework for understanding the computational methods.