PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF JACOBI ITERATIVE METHOD IN SOLVING DIAGONALLY DOMINANT LINEAR SYSTEM USING OPENACC

Solving linear system with a magnitude of thousand to ten thousand of unknowns takes a very long time in serial fashion. Furthermore, linear system that is discretised from Partial Differentiation Equations (PDE) is also typically solved by a class of iterative method. Therefore, by parallelising Jacobi Iterative Method using OpenACC, we are able to review and compare OpenACC's capabilities in accelerating Jacobi Iterative Method using compiler directives approach as opposed to CUDA's approach. Moreover, we implemented OpenACC in two distinctive domains, where the first domain is on manycore environment with a testbed hardware of Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 and the second domain is on multicore environment where 4 CPU(s) of AMD Opteron 6272 chips are clustered on a single machine with a total of 64 cores. This research project has shown great potentials of the implemented Jacobi Iterative Method using OpenACC as we managed to obtain verily rewarding results. Where, the highest speedup gain is up to 82x faster on GPU with Unified Memory (UM) enabled and 55x times faster on CPU where all 64 cores are fully utilized, and this is when the number of unknowns to be solved is 25,000 and 2,500 respectively.