Optimal and Efficient Parallel Tridiagonal Solvers Using Direct Methods

The problem of solving tridiagonal linear systems on parallel distributed-memory environments is considered in this paper. In particular, two common direct methods for solving such systems are considered: odd-even cyclic reduction and prefix summing. For each method, a variety of lower bounds on execution time for solving tridiagonal linear systems are presented. Specifically, lower bounds are presented that (a) hold when the number of data items per processor is bounded, (b) are general lower bounds, and (c) for specific data layouts commonly used in designing parallel algorithms to solve tridiagonal linear systems. Furthermore, algorithms are presented that have running times within a constant factor of the lower bounds provided. Lastly, a comparison of bounds for odd-even cyclic reduction and prefix summing is given.