Jack Dongarra
University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Seamless Access to Adaptive Solver Algorithms

Abstract:

The NetSolve project was established to aid scientists who prefer not to be concerned with the usual tedium associated with finding and maintaining software libraries with which to create programs, toolkits and problem solving environments particular to their scientific domain.
Through NetSolve, users are given access to complex algorithms that solve a variety of types of problems, one instance being linear systems solver. All solvers, however, are not built alike; depending on the characteristics of the matrix being solved some perform poorly and others not at all. This article introduces the reader to the Net Solve system and discusses how it can be used to access a large suite of numerical solvers, and to analyse the input matrix to determine, transparent to the user, a solver and use it to find a solution to the system. We give some background on the design of the netsolve system, the interface to solver packages, and we discuss the heuristics used in transparently determining the specific solver.