An Out-of-Core Sparse Cholesky Solver

Direct methods for solving large sparse linear systems of equations are popular because of their generality and robustness. Their main weakness is that the memory they require usually increases rapidly with problem size. We discuss the design and development of the first release of a new symmetric direct solver that aims to circumvent this limitation by allowing the system matrix, intermediate data, and the matrix factors to be stored externally. The code, which is written in Fortran and called HSL_MA77, implements a multifrontal algorithm. The first release is for positive-definite systems and performs a Cholesky factorization. Special attention is paid to the use of efficient dense linear algebra kernel codes that handle the full-matrix operations on the frontal matrix and to the input/output operations. The input/output operations are performed using a separate package that provides a virtual-memory system and allows the data to be spread over many files; for very large problems these may be held on more than one device. Numerical results are presented for a collection of 30 large real-world problems, all of which were solved successfully.