NPAC Technical Report SCCS-552
Parallel Block-Diagonal-Bordered Sparse Linear Solvers for Electrical Power System Applications
David Koester, Sanjay Ranka, Geoffrey Fox
Submitted October 01 1993
Abstract
Research is on-going that examines parallel direct
block-diagonal-bordered sparse linear solvers for irregular sparse
matrix problems derived from electrical power system applications.
Parallel block-diagonal-bordered sparse linear solvers exhibit
distinct advantages when compared to current general parallel direct
sparse matrix solvers. Our research shows that actual power system
matrices can be readily ordered into block-diagonal-bordered form,
although load imbalance becomes excessive beyond 16 processors,
limiting scalability for a single parallel linear solver within an
application. Nevertheless, other dimensions exist in electrical power
system applications that can be exploited to efficiently make use of
large-scale multi-processors.