Sparse Tiling for Stationary Iterative Methods

In modern computers, a program’s data locality can affect performance significantly. This paper details full sparse tiling, a run-time reordering transformation that improves the data locality for stationary iterative methods such as Gauss–Seidel operating on sparse matrices. In scientific applications such as finite element analysis, these iterative methods dominate the execution time. Full sparse tiling chooses a permutation of the rows and columns of the sparse matrix, and then an order of execution that achieves better data locality. We prove that full sparsetiled Gauss–Seidel generates a solution that is bitwise identical to traditional Gauss–Seidel on the permuted matrix. We also present measurements of the performance improvements and the overheads of full sparse tiling and of cache blocking for irregular grids, a related technique developed by Douglas et al.