Reducing Computation and Communication in Scientific Computing: Connecting Theory to Practice.
This report summarizes the work produced as part of a Truman Fellowship appointment and its associated LDRD project. The overall goal of the project was to develop better algorithms and implementations for key computational kernels within the field of scientific computing by designing them to be communication efficient, moving as little data as possible. The primary problem of interest was dense matrix multiplication; other computations that were addressed include sparse matrix-matrix multiplication, QR factorization, solving symmetric linear systems, and the symmetric eigendecomposition. The project also involved the study of computations at the intersection of scientific computing and data analysis, including nonnegative matrix factorization for discovering latent factors, Tucker tensor decomposition for data compression, and sampling methods for similarity search.