Parallel GPU-Accelerated Randomized Construction of Approximate Cholesky Preconditioners

Abstract: We introduce a parallel algorithm to construct a preconditioner for solving a large, sparse linear system where the coefficient matrix is a Laplacian matrix (a.k.a., graph Laplacian). Such a linear system arises from applications such as discretization of a partial differential equation, spectral graph partitioning, and learning problems on graphs. The preconditioner belongs to the family of incomplete factorizations and is purely algebraic. Unlike traditional incomplete factorizations, the new method employs randomization to determine whether or not to keep fill-ins, i.e., newly generated nonzero elements during Gaussian elimination. Since the sparsity pattern of the randomized factorization is unknown, computing such a factorization in parallel is extremely challenging, especially on many-core architectures such as GPUs. Our parallel algorithm dynamically computes the dependency among row/column indices of the Laplacian matrix to be factorized and processes the independent indices in parallel. Furthermore, unlike previous approaches, our method requires little pre-processing time. We implemented the parallel algorithm for multi-core CPUs and GPUs, and we compare their performance to other state-of-the-art methods.