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In this article, we focus on the communication costs of three symmetric matrix computations: i) multiplying a matrix with its transpose, known as a symmetric rank-k update (SYRK) ii) adding the result of the multiplication of a matrix with the transpose of another matrix and the transpose of that result, known as a symmetric rank-2k update (SYR2K) iii) performing matrix multiplication with a symmetric input matrix (SYMM). All three computations appear in the Level 3 Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS) and have wide use in applications involving symmetric matrices. We establish communication lower bounds for these kernels using sequential and distributed-memory parallel computational models, and we show that our bounds are tight by presenting communication-optimal algorithms for each setting. Our lower bound proofs rely on applying a geometric inequality for symmetric computations and analytically solving constrained nonlinear optimization problems. The symmetric matrix and its corresponding computations are accessed and performed according to a triangular block partitioning scheme in the optimal algorithms. 

Multiple tensor-times-matrix (Multi-TTM) is a key computation in algorithms for computing and operating with the Tucker tensor decomposition, which is frequently used in multidimensional data analysis. We establish communication lower bounds that determine how much data movement is required (under mild conditions) to perform the Multi-TTM computation in parallel. The crux of the proof relies on analytically solving a constrained, nonlinear optimization problem. We also present a parallel algorithm to perform this computation that organizes the processors into a logical grid with twice as many modes as the input tensor. We show that, with correct choices of grid dimensions, the communication cost of the algorithm attains the lower bounds and is therefore communication optimal. Finally, we show that our algorithm can significantly reduce communication compared to the straightforward approach of expressing the computation as a sequence of tensor-times-matrix operations when the input and output tensors vary greatly in size.