Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 CNLS Staff Members 
 Executive Committee 
 Postdocs 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Ulam Scholar 
 Anastasio Fellow 
 
 Student Requests      
 Student Program 
 Visitor Requests 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Monday, November 10, 2025
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Seminar

Joint CNLS & IC-APT Colloquium. Performance Engineering for Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication: Some new ideas for old problems

Professor Gerhard Wellein, Friedrich-Alexander
Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU)

The sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) kernel is a key performance component of numerous algorithms in computational science. Despite the kernel’s apparent simplicity, the sparse and potentially irregular data access patterns of SpMV and its intrinsically low computational intensity haven been challenging the development of high-performance implementations over decades. Still these developments are rarely guided by appropriate performance models. This talk will report on recent advancements to boost the performance of SpMV with symmetric matrices and cache blocking in the computation of matrix power kernels (MPK) for sparse matrices. Reformulating the SpMV as a graph traversal problem as used by RACE [1] allows us to handle dependencies in parallelization and cache blocking in an hardware efficient way. On the compute node-level the RACE implementation of sparse MPK achieves speed-ups of up to 2x-5x compared to state-of-the art implementations [2]. Various numerical schemes like s-step Krylov solvers, polynomial preconditioners and power clustering algorithms may directly benefit from these developments.

[1] Alappat, C. L. et al.: A Recursive Algebraic Coloring Technique for Hardware-efficient Symmetric Sparse Matrix-vector Multiplication. In: ACM TOPC 7 (2020), Article No.: 19. ISSN: 2329-4949. DOI: 10.1145/3399732

[2] Alappat, C.L. et al.: Level-Based Blocking for Sparse Matrices: Sparse Matrix-Power-Vector Multiplication. In: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 581-597, 1 Feb. 2023, doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2022.3223512

Bio: Gerhard Wellein is a Professor for High Performance Computing at the Department for Computer Science of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU) and holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Bayreuth. Since 2021 he is the director of the Erlangen National Center for High Performance Computing (NHR@FAU). Gerhard Wellein has more than twenty years of experience in teaching HPC techniques to students and scientists from computational science and engineering. His research interests focus on performance modelling and performance engineering, architecture-specific code optimization, novel parallelization approaches and hardware-efficient building blocks for sparse linear algebra and stencil solvers. He has been conducting and leading numerous HPC projects.

Prospective Joint CNLS & IC-APT Colloquium speakers: please contact Anna Matsekh matsekh@lanl.gov to propose or to nominate a talk. We aim to bring presentations featuring both fundamental and applied research conducted utilizing Institutional Computing and HPC resources at LANL, across the DOE complex, and externally. We also welcome informal HPC-focused training sessions.
Past Joint CNLS & IC-APT Colloquia presentations: https://ic-wiki.lanl.gov/Home

Teams: Join the meeting now
Meeting ID: 295 410 931 869 6
Passcode: 8SZ7zn3c

Host: Avadh Saxena (T-4)