cuSolver

Description

The cuSolver library is a high-level package based on the cuBLAS and cuSPARSE libraries. It combines three separate libraries under a single umbrella, each of which can be used independently or in concert with other toolkit libraries. This library is available as of CUDA 6.5.

The intent of cuSolver is to provide useful LAPACK-like features, such as common matrix factorization and triangular solve routines for dense matrices, a sparse least-squares solver and an eigenvalue solver. In addition cuSolver provides a new refactorization library useful for solving sequences of matrices with a shared sparsity pattern.
 
The first part of cuSolver is called cuSolverDN, and deals with dense matrix factorization and solve routines such as LU, QR, SVD and LDLT, as well as useful utilities such as matrix and vector permutations.
 
Next, cuSolverSP provides a new set of sparse routines based on a sparse QR factorization. Not all matrices have a good sparsity pattern for parallelism in factorization, so the cuSolverSP library also provides a CPU path to handle those sequential-like matrices. For those matrices with abundant parallelism, the GPU path will deliver higher performance. The library is designed to be called from C and C++.
 
The final part is cuSolverRF, a sparse re-factorization package that can provide very good performance when solving a sequence of matrices where only the coefficients are changed but the sparsity pattern remains the same.
 
The GPU path of the cuSolver library assumes data is already in the device memory. It is the responsibility of the developer to allocate memory and to copy data between GPU memory and CPU memory using standard CUDA runtime API routines, such as cudaMalloc(), cudaFree(), cudaMemcpy(), and cudaMemcpyAsync().

 

How to use cuSolver

% module load cudatoolkit

This will load the default version of cudatoolkit including cuSolver library. To see more information on the cudatoolkit module, use

% module show cudatoolkit

To compile and link a code that uses cuSolver, use

% nvcc -o test_cuSolver test_cuSolver.cpp -lcublas -lcusolver

To run the code on an XK node, use

% aprun -n 1 ./test_cuSolver

 

Examples

Example Code for QR Factorization using cuSolver library, test_cusolver_cuda6d5.cpp

 

Additional Information / References