$O(N)$ distributed direct factorization of structured dense matrices using runtime systems

Abstract: Structured dense matrices result from boundary integral problems in electrostatics and geostatistics, and also Schur complements in sparse preconditioners such as multi-frontal methods. Exploiting the structure of such matrices can reduce the time for dense direct factorization from $O(N^3)$ to $O(N)$. The Hierarchically Semi-Separable (HSS) matrix is one such low rank matrix format that can be factorized using a Cholesky-like algorithm called ULV factorization. The HSS-ULV algorithm is highly parallel because it removes the dependency on trailing sub-matrices at each HSS level. However, a key merge step that links two successive HSS levels remains a challenge for efficient parallelization. In this paper, we use an asynchronous runtime system PaRSEC with the HSS-ULV algorithm. We compare our work with STRUMPACK and LORAPO, both state-of-the-art implementations of dense direct low rank factorization, and achieve up to 2x better factorization time for matrices arising from a diverse set of applications on up to 128 nodes of Fugaku for similar or better accuracy for all the problems that we survey.