Performance measurement and comparison of a set of parallel periodic and non-periodic tridiagonal solvers

Various traditional solvers have been proposed in recent years for different parallel platforms. In this paper, the performance of three tridiagonal solvers, namely, the parallel partition LU algorithm, the parallel diagonal dominant algorithm, and the reduced diagonal dominant algorithm, is studied. These algorithms are designed for distributed-memory machines and are tested on an Intel Paragon and an IBM SP2 machines. Measured results are reported in terms of execution time and speedup. The measured results match analytical results closely. In addition to address implementation issues, performance considerations such as problem sizes and models of speedup are also discussed.