Proc. 10-th Int. Conf. on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS'98), October 1998, Las Vegas, NV, pp. 186-189.

Ömer Egecioglu

LU Factorization and Parallel Evaluation of Continued Fractions

Abstract. We consider the parallelization of the LU decomposition part of the LU Algorithm for an nxn tridiagonal linear system, and the related problem of evaluation of continued fractions. Direct application of the parallel prefix algorithm for parallel evaluation of continued fractions results in a parallel algorithm that requires O(n^2/log n) processors and takes O(log^2 n) parallel time. We show that a suffix product formulation for continued fractions together with a parallel prefix algorithm can be used for parallel tridiagonal LU decomposition optimally in O(log n) time using O(n/log n) processors.

omer@cs.ucsb.edu