Solution of sparse systems on GPU architecture

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Thesis Type: Postgraduate

Institution Of The Thesis: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, Turkey

Approval Date: 2011

Student: ANDAÇ LÜLEÇ

Supervisor: ÖZGÜR KURÇ

Abstract:

The solution of the linear system of equations is one of the core aspects of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software. Since large amount of arithmetic operations are required for the solution of the system obtained by FEA, the influence of the solution of linear equations on the performance of the software is very significant. In recent years, the increasing demand for performance in the game industry caused significant improvements on the performances of Graphical Processing Units (GPU). With their massive floating point operations capability, they became attractive sources of performance for the general purpose programmers. Because of this reason, GPUs are chosen as the target hardware to develop an efficient parallel direct solver for the solution of the linear equations obtained from FEA.