Sponsored Research Projects

 

Current Projects

 

Preconditioning Techniques for Linear Systems of Equations

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

PI: Vivek Sarin

 

 

The goal of the project is to develop novel preconditioning techniques for sparse and dense linear systems. These techniques will use a sequence of linear transformations to obtain a preconditioned system from the original one. Techniques will be developed to analyze the preconditioned system, and schemes will be developed to improve the effectiveness of the preconditioner. The resulting preconditioners will be robust, effective, and inexpensive. These preconditioning techniques will be implemented, analyzed, and tested on a variety of problems.

 

 

ITR: Coastal Modeling and Management

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

PI: Patrick Lynett

Co-PIs: T-J. Hsu, P. L. Liu, B. Raubenheimer, and Vivek Sarin

 

 

The goal of this project is to develop a coupled, hybrid hydrodynamic computational model for simulation and prediction of complex water wave processes from the deep ocean to the shoreline. The model will be physically comprehensive, with total domain scales on the order of hundred's of kilometers, yet with a nearshore grid resolution less than a meter. To include this great range of scales, a number of diverse hydrodynamic models, with various but overlapping physical and practical constraints, will be integrated to create a hybrid hydrodynamic software tool. The method of interfacing the different hydrodynamic models will be founded in distributed computing techniques, thereby allowing for utilization of computer cluster resources. In addition, each of the individual models in the hybrid system will be parallelized, leading to the creation of a massively parallel and distributed simulation platform.

 

 

Past Projects

 

CAREER: Robust Preconditioners for Sparse Linear Systems

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

PI: Vivek Sarin

 

 

In this project we developed a new class of robust and parallelizable preconditioners for the solution of sparse linear systems arising from partial differential equations. The approach was based on a hierarchical decomposition of the matrices associated with the linear system, and was designed to improve the effectiveness of the preconditioner without compromising the parallelism inherent in the computation. A formal methodology was developed for construction, application, and analysis of these preconditioners. Effectiveness of these techniques were tested on problems in incompressible fluid simulations. Parallel implementations of these preconditioners were developed and their performance evaluated for various multiprocessor platforms.

 

ITR/AP: Modeling and Simulation of Sub-micron VLSI

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

PI: Vivek Sarin

Co-PI: Weiping Shi

 

 

In this project we developed preconditioned iterative methods for solving the linear systems arising in inductance and capacitance extraction problems. Solvers for the inductance problem used a novel solenoidal basis approach to precondition a reduced system implicitly, leading to rapid convergence of the iterative methods. Fast approximations to the matrix-vector products with dense system matrices were computed using efficient hierarchical methods.

 

Parallel Algorithms and Software for Delay Estimation in VLSI Circuits

Sponsor: Texas Advanced Technology Program

PI: Vivek Sarin

Co-PI: Weiping Shi

 

 

We developed a software package called ParIS for parasitic extraction of based on novel algorithms. The package provides the capability of fast parasitic extraction on a variety of parallel computers.

 

Hierarchical N-body Methods

Sponsor: SGI, Inc.

PIAhmed Sameh 

Co-PIs: Ananth Grama, Vivek Sarin

 

 

In this project we developed innovative techniques and software for fast methods in particle dynamics and their applications. The project addressed algorithmic issues, serial and parallel performance, portability, and I/O requirements in the context of selected applications. Specifically, the project made research contributions in the following areas:

·         Error Control and Boundary Conditions for Hierarchical Treecodes

·         Robust Parallel Algorithms and Libraries for Dynamic Environments

Data Analysis and I/O Control

 

KDI: Direct Simulation of Solid-Liquid Flows

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

PI: Dan Joseph  

Co-PIs: Roland Glowinski, Howard Hu, Tsorng-Whay Pan, Yousef Saad, Ahmed Sameh, Vivek Sarin
Project Home

 

 

Simulations of solid-liquid flows are of great interest to numerous industries using sedimenting and fluidized suspensions, lubricated transport, and hydraulic fracturing of hydrocarbon reservoirs. The state-of-the-art preconditioners and iterative methods are unable to solve the ill-conditioned, large, sparse linear systems that arise in 3D simulations. We have proposed a novel multilevel approach that is a robust and effective preconditioner for these systems in addition to being efficiently parallelizable. Using this preconditioner, flows with thousands of particles can now be simulated on parallel computers such as the SGI Origin2000. Such simulations were not possible with existing methods. A unique feature of this approach is that a well-conditioned basis for the zero-divergence fluid space is explicitly computed. As a result, this technique is ideally suited for those engineering applications where conservation laws must be strictly enforced. We plan to extend the multilevel approach to non-Newtonian fluid flows with larger number of particles. There, issues related to visualization, data analysis, distributed object-oriented computing, and performance evaluation of software assume great importance - these will also be the focus of our continuing research.

 

Innovative Algorithms and Techniques for Large Scale Simulations

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

PIAhmed Sameh 

Co-PIs: Ananth Grama, Vivek Sarin

 

 

The core issue in many scientific applications is the solution of extremely large, sparse linear systems on parallel computers. In general, this is achieved by using a preconditioned iterative method. However, the ultimate goal of finding robust, effective, and parallelizable preconditioners has been elusive. We have developed parallel preconditioners based on the multilevel technique described earlier that are very effective for linear systems arising from partial differential equations. We have also developed several novel algorithms, e.g., the balance scheme, that use projection-based techniques to transform the original linear system into a favorably conditioned reduced system. The reduced system can be solved efficiently on parallel computers using well known iterative methods.

 

 

 

Updated by Vivek Sarin on January 13, 2006