Symmetric Multiprocessing Capabilities of the Resistive Companion Solver

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Symmetric Multiprocessing Capabilities of the
Resistive Companion Solver
VTB Users and Developers Conference Columbia,
SC September 15, 2004

• Rod Leonard
• Graduate Student
• Dept of Electrical Engineering
• University of South Carolina

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Outline

• The need for SMP
• The challenge and cost
• Features currently available
• Performance analysis of currently available
  features
• Future Directions

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Interesting Systems

• Lots of components
• Computationally intensive components
• Both

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The Problem

• Computationally intensive models
• Large amounts of models means a big matrix to
  solve
• Matrix inversion is costly

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The Solution

• Specialized machine, with multiple processors
• Divide the workload, work problem faster

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The Reality

• Does not scale linearly not everything can be
  parallelized
• Overhead associated with solution

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Where We Are Now

• Isolated Systems Threading

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Available Features

• Make use of it now

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Fitting the Problem to the Solution

• Using hardware-in-the-loop solutions to improve
  performance in the software
• Hardware-in-the-loop
• Decoupled system behaving as if it were coupled
• Software matrix separation
• Coupled system we would like to decouple while
  maintaining coupled behavior

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Fitting the Problem to the Solution

• System is decoupled through Resistive Companion
  method

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The Results

• Ten seconds simulation performed
• Without multithreading 227.921s
• With multithreading 208.719s

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Where We Are Going Next

• Optimization
• Separation of Matrix through other methods
• Matrix operations themselves parallelized using
  existing packages and other methods

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Where We Are Going Next

• Expensive machines
• Lots of Cheap Machines Beowulf Cluster
• New challenges, new benefits

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Thank you

• Thank you for your time
• Rod Leonard
• University of South Carolina
• leonard_at_engr.sc.edu