Multistage Mixed Precision Iterative Refinement
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Low precision arithmetic, in particular half precision (16-bit) floating point arithmetic, is now available in commercial hardware. Using lower precision can offer significant savings in computation and communication costs with proportional savings in energy. Motivated by this, there have recently emerged a number of new iterative refinement schemes for solving linear systems Ax=b, both based on standard LU factorization and GMRES solvers, that exploit multiple different precisions. Each particular algorithm and each combination of precisions leads to different condition number-based constraints for convergence of the backward and forward errors, and each has different performance costs. Given that the user may not necessarily know the condition number of their matrix a priori, it may be difficult to select the optimal variant for their problem. In this work, we develop a three-stage mixed precision iterative refinement solver which aims to combine existing mixed precision approaches to balance performance and accuracy and improve usability. For a given combination of precisions, the algorithm begins with the least expensive approach and convergence is monitored via inexpensive computations with quantities produced during the iteration. If slow convergence or divergence is detected using particular stopping criteria, the algorithm switches to use more expensive, but more reliable GMRES-based refinement approaches. After presenting the algorithm and its details, we perform extensive numerical experiments on a variety of random dense problems and problems from real applications. Our experiments demonstrate that the theoretical constraints derived in the literature are often overly strict in practice, further motivating the need for a multistage approach.
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