General introduction
COALA is an INRIA associated team that focuses on the design and implementation of numerical algorithms for today's large supercomputers formed by thousands of multicore processors, possibly with accelerators. We focus on operations that are at the heart of many scientific applications as solving linear systems of equations or least squares problems. The algorithms belong to a new class referred to as communication avoiding that provably minimize communication, where communication means the data transferred between levels of memory hierarchy or between processors in a parallel computer. This research is motivated by studies showing that communication costs can already exceed arithmetic costs by orders of magnitude, and the gap is growing exponentially over time. In this collaboration, we have developed communication avoiding algorithms for several operations in dense linear algebra, as LU factorization, QR factorization, rank revealing QR factorization, etc. We also have obtained recently results for sparse linear algebra as sparse matrix-matrix multiplication, iterative solvers, and ILU preconditioner. For more information, please see our publications. An important aspect that we consider here is the validation of the algorithms in real applications through our collaborations. Follow the Research link on the left to find out more about the science objectives of COALA.
COALA is a collaboration between INRIA Rocquencourt (Paris, France), and UC Berkeley (Berkeley, USA). Follow the Members link on the left to learn more about the collaboration.