arXiv subjects

Pasqua D'Ambra

Publications and source records attributed to Pasqua D'Ambra.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Mixed-Precision Computing for Scientific Discovery: Formats, Co-Design, and Responsible Approximation

Reduced and mixed precision have moved from a niche optimization to a central design axis in scientific computing and engineering, driven by energy constraints, heterogeneous accelerators, and the convergence of simulation and machine learning. This paper organizes the landscape around seven coupled themes---number formats, floating-point emulation, emerging architectures, hardware/software co-design, relation to other approximations, software design, and precision as a multilevel resource ---and, for each theme, synthesizes the state of the art, future directions, and open questions. We emphasize \emph{energy per trusted solution} as the core objective, and we frame \say{recklessly responsible} computing as a pragmatic doctrine: exploit low precision aggressively, but with systematic detection, escalation, and certification pathways.

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arXiv2026

Scalable s-step Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient with Chebyshev Basis and Gauss-Seidel Gram Solve

We present a variant of the s--step Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) method that combines a Chebyshev--stabilized Krylov basis with a Forward Gauss--Seidel (FGS) iteration for the solution of the reduced Gram systems. In s--step PCG, multiple search directions are generated per outer iteration, reducing global synchronization costs but requiring the solution of small dense Gram systems whose conditioning is critical for stability. For a raw Chebyshev Krylov block, we derive an exact moment--based representation of the associated Gram matrix in the unpreconditioned setting and discuss its extension to left preconditioning. This representation provides a structural interpretation of the favorable Gram--matrix behavior observed for moderate step sizes. Building on inexact Krylov theory and on the algebraic connection between FGS and Modified Gram--Schmidt (MGS), we derive residual bounds for the reduced solves and provide a rationale for using a fixed, moderate number of FGS sweeps. Numerical experiments assess the resulting accuracy of the Gram solves and the convergence behavior of the outer iteration. Large--scale experiments on modern NVIDIA GPU architectures, including weak-scaling tests with aggregation-based Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) preconditioning, show that, within the tested configurations, the proposed Chebyshev--stabilized $s$--step PCG method with FGS Gram solves achieves convergence comparable to classical PCG while reducing global synchronization overhead. The results demonstrate its potential as a scalable communication--reducing solver for current and next--generation accelerator systems.

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arXiv2026

Parallel matching-based AMG preconditioners for elliptic equations discretized by IgA

Isogeometric analysis (IgA) offers enhanced approximation capabilities for the discretization of elliptic boundary-value problems, yet it results in large, sparse, and increasingly ill-conditioned linear systems due to higher interconnectivity among degrees of freedom. In particular, the discretization with tensor-product B-splines or NURBS of degree $p$ on a mesh with $n$ elements per parametric direction leads to symmetric positive-definite systems of the form $K\mathbf{u} = \mathbf{F}$, where the matrix bandwidth and condition number scale unfavorably with both $p$ and spatial dimension $d$. To address the computational challenges posed by such systems, especially in three-dimensional or high-order scenarios, Krylov subspace methods with specialized preconditioners become essential. This paper investigates the efficacy of algebraic multigrid (AMG) preconditioners tailored for IgA-based discretizations, with a focus on performance in modern high-performance computing (HPC) environments. Leveraging the Parallel Sparse Computation Toolkit (PSCToolkit), we explore distributed-memory and GPU-accelerated strategies for solving large-scale problems. The study assesses algorithmic efficiency and scalability across a range of benchmark tests. The results demonstrate that AMG preconditioners can achieve robust and scalable performance, confirming their potential as practical solvers for large IgA systems in engineering and scientific applications.

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arXiv2026

On the energy efficiency of sparse matrix computations on multi-GPU clusters

We investigate the energy efficiency of a library designed for parallel computations with sparse matrices. The library leverages high-performance, energy-efficient Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerators to enable large-scale scientific applications. Our primary development objective was to maximize parallel performance and scalability in solving sparse linear systems whose dimensions far exceed the memory capacity of a single node. To this end, we devised methods that expose a high degree of parallelism while optimizing algorithmic implementations for efficient multi-GPU usage. Previous work has already demonstrated the library's performance efficiency on large-scale systems comprising thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, achieving improvements over state-of-the-art solutions. In this paper, we extend those results by providing energy profiles that address the growing sustainability requirements of modern HPC platforms. We present our methodology and tools for accurate runtime energy measurements of the library's core components and discuss the findings. Our results confirm that optimizing GPU computations and minimizing data movement across memory and computing nodes reduces both time-to-solution and energy consumption. Moreover, we show that the library delivers substantial advantages over comparable software frameworks on standard benchmarks.

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arXiv2025

Inexact Gauss Seidel and Coarse Solvers for AMG and s-step CG

Communication-avoiding Krylov methods require solving small dense Gram systems at each outer iteration. We present a low-synchronization approach based on Forward Gauss--Seidel (FGS), which exploits the structure of Gram matrices arising from Chebyshev polynomial bases. We show that a single FGS sweep is mathematically equivalent to Modified Gram--Schmidt (MGS) orthogonalization in the $A$-norm and provide corresponding backward error bounds. For weak scaling on AMD MI-series GPUs, we demonstrate that 20--30 FGS iterations preserve scalability up to 64 GPUs with problem sizes exceeding 700 million unknowns. We further extend this approach to Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) coarse-grid solves, removing the need to assemble or factor dense coarse operators

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arXiv2025

Optimal Polynomial Smoothers for Parallel AMG

In this paper, we explore polynomial accelerators that are well-suited for parallel computations, specifically as smoothers in Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) preconditioners. These accelerators address a minimax problem, initially formulated in [Lottes, Numer. Lin. Alg. with Appl. 30(6), 2518 (2023)], aiming to achieve an optimal (or near-optimal) bound for a polynomial-dependent constant involved in the AMG V-cycle error bound, without requiring information about the matrices' spectra. Lottes focuses on Chebyshev polynomials of the 4th-kind and defines the relevant recurrence formulas applicable to a general convergent basic smoother. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of these accelerations for large-scale applications on modern GPU-accelerated supercomputers. Furthermore, we formulate a variant of the aforementioned minimax problem, which naturally leads to solutions relying on Chebyshev polynomials of the 1st-kind as accelerators for a basic smoother. For all the polynomial accelerations, we describe efficient GPU kernels for their application and demonstrate their comparable effectiveness on standard benchmarks at very large scales.

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arXiv2025

PSCToolkit: solving sparse linear systems with a large number of GPUs

In this chapter, we describe the Parallel Sparse Computation Toolkit (PSCToolkit), a suite of libraries for solving large-scale linear algebra problems in an HPC environment. In particular, we focus on the tools provided for the solution of symmetric and positive-definite linear systems using up to 8192 GPUs on the EuroHPC-JU Leonardo supercomputer. PSCToolkit is an ongoing mathematical software project aimed at exploiting the extreme computational speed of current supercomputers for relevant problems in Computational and Data Science. The toolkit is designed for node-level efficiency, flexibility and usability, supporting integration with both Fortran and C/C++, enabling researchers and developers from diverse computational backgrounds to leverage its powerful capabilities.

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arXiv2025

Communication-reduced Conjugate Gradient Variants for GPU-accelerated Clusters

Linear solvers are key components in any software platform for scientific and engineering computing. The solution of large and sparse linear systems lies at the core of physics-driven numerical simulations relying on partial differential equations (PDEs) and often represents a significant bottleneck in datadriven procedures, such as scientific machine learning. In this paper, we present an efficient implementation of the preconditioned s-step Conjugate Gradient (CG) method, originally proposed by Chronopoulos and Gear in 1989, for large clusters of Nvidia GPU-accelerated computing nodes. The method, often referred to as communication-reduced or communication-avoiding CG, reduces global synchronizations and data communication steps compared to the standard approach, enhancing strong and weak scalability on parallel computers. Our main contribution is the design of a parallel solver that fully exploits the aggregation of low-granularity operations inherent to the s-step CG method to leverage the high throughput of GPU accelerators. Additionally, it applies overlap between data communication and computation in the multi-GPU sparse matrix-vector product. Experiments on classic benchmark datasets, derived from the discretization of the Poisson PDE, demonstrate the potential of the method.

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arXiv2023

Alya towards Exascale: Algorithmic Scalability using PSCToolkit

In this paper, we describe an upgrade of the Alya code with up-to-date parallel linear solvers capable of achieving reliability, efficiency and scalability in the computation of the pressure field at each time step of the numerical procedure for solving a Large Eddy Simulation formulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. We developed a software module in Alya's kernel to interface the libraries included in the current version of PSCToolkit, a framework for the iterative solution of sparse linear systems on parallel distributed-memory computers by Krylov methods coupled to Algebraic MultiGrid preconditioners. The Toolkit has undergone various extensions within the EoCoE-II project with the primary goal of facing the exascale challenge. Results on a realistic benchmark for airflow simulations in wind farm applications show that the PSCToolkit solvers significantly outperform the original versions of the Conjugate Gradient method available in the Alya's kernel in terms of scalability and parallel efficiency and represent a very promising software layer to move the Alya code towards exascale.

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arXiv2023

Multi-GPU aggregation-based AMG preconditioner for iterative linear solvers

We present and release in open source format a sparse linear solver which efficiently exploits heterogeneous parallel computers. The solver can be easily integrated into scientific applications that need to solve large and sparse linear systems on modern parallel computers made of hybrid nodes hosting NVIDIA Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerators. The work extends our previous efforts in the exploitation of a single GPU accelerator and proposes an implementation, based on the hybrid MPI-CUDA software environment, of a Krylov-type linear solver relying on an efficient Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) preconditioner already available in the BootCMatchG library. Our design for the hybrid implementation has been driven by the best practices for minimizing data communication overhead when multiple GPUs are employed, yet preserving the efficiency of the single GPU kernels. Strong and weak scalability results on well-known benchmark test cases of the new version of the library are discussed. Comparisons with the Nvidia AmgX solution show an improvement of up to 2.0x in the solve phase.

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arXiv2023

Extending Bootstrap AMG for Clustering of Attributed Graphs

In this paper we propose a new approach to detect clusters in undirected graphs with attributed vertices. We incorporate structural and attribute similarities between the vertices in an augmented graph by creating additional vertices and edges as proposed in [1, 2]. The augmented graph is then embedded in a Euclidean space associated to its Laplacian and we cluster vertices via a modified K-means algorithm, using a new vector-valued distance in the embedding space. Main novelty of our method, which can be classified as an early fusion method, i.e., a method in which additional information on vertices are fused to the structure information before applying clustering, is the interpretation of attributes as new realizations of graph vertices, which can be dealt with as coordinate vectors in a related Euclidean space. This allows us to extend a scalable generalized spectral clustering procedure which substitutes graph Laplacian eigenvectors with some vectors, named algebraically smooth vectors, obtained by a linear-time complexity Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) method. We discuss the performance of our proposed clustering method by comparison with recent literature approaches and public available results. Extensive experiments on different types of synthetic datasets and real-world attributed graphs show that our new algorithm, embedding attributes information in the clustering, outperforms structure-only-based methods, when the attributed network has an ambiguous structure. Furthermore, our new method largely outperforms the method which originally proposed the graph augmentation, showing that our embedding strategy and vector-valued distance are very effective in taking advantages from the augmented-graph representation.

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arXiv2022

Automatic coarsening in Algebraic Multigrid utilizing quality measures for matching-based aggregations

In this paper, we discuss the convergence of an Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) method for general symmetric positive-definite matrices. The method relies on an aggregation algorithm, named \emph{coarsening based on compatible weighted matching}, which exploits the interplay between the principle of compatible relaxation and the maximum product matching in undirected weighted graphs. The results are based on a general convergence analysis theory applied to the class of AMG methods employing unsmoothed aggregation and identifying a quality measure for the coarsening; similar quality measures were originally introduced and applied to other methods as tools to obtain good quality aggregates leading to optimal convergence for M-matrices. The analysis, as well as the coarsening procedure, is purely algebraic and, in our case, allows an \emph{a posteriori} evaluation of the quality of the aggregation procedure which we apply to analyze the impact of approximate algorithms for matching computation and the definition of graph edge weights. We also explore the connection between the choice of the aggregates and the compatible relaxation convergence, confirming the consistency between theories for designing coarsening procedures in purely algebraic multigrid methods and the effectiveness of the coarsening based on compatible weighted matching. We discuss various completely automatic algorithmic approaches to obtain aggregates for which good convergence properties are achieved on various test cases.

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arXiv2022

Why diffusion-based preconditioning of Richards equation works: spectral analysis and computational experiments at very large scale

We consider here a cell-centered finite difference approximation of the Richards equation in three dimensions, averaging for interface values the hydraulic conductivity $K=K(p)$, a highly nonlinear function, by arithmetic, upstream, and harmonic means. The nonlinearities in the equation can lead to changes in soil conductivity over several orders of magnitude and discretizations with respect to space variables often produce stiff systems of differential equations. A fully implicit time discretization is provided by \emph{backward Euler} one-step formula; the resulting nonlinear algebraic system is solved by an inexact Newton Armijo-Goldstein algorithm, requiring the solution of a sequence of linear systems involving Jacobian matrices. We prove some new results concerning the distribution of the Jacobians eigenvalues and the explicit expression of their entries. Moreover, we explore some connections between the saturation of the soil and the ill-conditioning of the Jacobians. The information on eigenvalues justifies the effectiveness of some preconditioner approaches which are widely used in the solution of Richards equation. We also propose a new software framework to experiment with scalable and robust preconditioners suitable for efficient parallel simulations at very large scales. Performance results on a literature test case show that our framework is very promising in the advance towards realistic simulations at extreme scale.

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arXiv2021

AMG preconditioners for Linear Solvers towards Extreme Scale

Linear solvers for large and sparse systems are a key element of scientific applications, and their efficient implementation is necessary to harness the computational power of current computers. Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) preconditioners are a popular ingredient of such linear solvers; this is the motivation for the present work where we examine some recent developments in a package of AMG preconditioners to improve efficiency, scalability, and robustness on extreme-scale problems. The main novelty is the design and implementation of a parallel coarsening algorithm based on aggregation of unknowns employing weighted graph matching techniques; this is a completely automated procedure, requiring no information from the user, and applicable to general symmetric positive definite (s.p.d.) matrices. The new coarsening algorithm improves in terms of numerical scalability at low operator complexity over decoupled aggregation algorithms available in previous releases of the package. The preconditioners package is built on the parallel software framework \texttt{PSBLAS}, which has also been updated to progress towards exascale. We present weak scalability results on one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, for linear systems with sizes up to $O(10^{10})$ unknowns.

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arXiv2019

Improving Solve Time of aggregation-based adaptive AMG

This paper proposes improving the solve time of a bootstrap AMG designed previously by the authors. This is achieved by incorporating the information, set of algebraically smooth vectors, generated by the bootstrap algorithm, in a single hierarchy by using sufficiently large aggregates, and these aggregates are compositions of aggregates already built throughout the bootstrap algorithm. The modified AMG method has good convergence properties and shows significant reduction in both, memory and solve time. These savings with respect to the original bootstrap AMG are illustrated on some difficult (for standard AMG) linear systems arising from discretization of scalar and vector function elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) in both 2d and 3d.

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arXiv2018

AMG based on compatible weighted matching for GPUs

We describe main issues and design principles of an efficient implementation, tailored to recent generations of Nvidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), of an Algebraic Multigrid (AMG) preconditioner previously proposed by one of the authors and already available in the open-source package BootCMatch: Bootstrap algebraic multigrid based on Compatible weighted Matching for standard CPU. The AMG method relies on a new approach for coarsening sparse symmetric positive definite (spd) matrices, named "coarsening based on compatible weighted matching". It exploits maximum weight matching in the adjacency graph of the sparse matrix, driven by the principle of compatible relaxation, providing a suitable aggregation of unknowns which goes beyond the limits of the usual heuristics applied in the current methods. We adopt an approximate solution of the maximum weight matching problem, based on a recently proposed parallel algorithm, referred as the Suitor algorithm, and show that it allow us to obtain good quality coarse matrices for our AMG on GPUs. We exploit inherent parallelism of modern GPUs in all the kernels involving sparse matrix computations both for the setup of the preconditioner and for its application in a Krylov solver, outperforming preconditioners available in Nvidia AmgX library. We report results about a large set of linear systems arising from discretization of scalar and vector partial differential equations (PDEs).

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