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Communication collectives are at the heart of distributed-memory parallel algorithms and the Message Passing Interface. In parallel computing courses, students can learn about collectives not only to utilize them as building blocks to implement other algorithms, but also as exemplars for designing and analyzing efficient algorithms. We develop a visualization tool to help students understand different algorithms for collective operations as well as evaluate and analyze the algorithms' efficiencies. Our implementation is written in C++ with OpenMP and uses the Thread Safe Graphics Library. We simulate distributed-memory message passing to implement the algorithms, and the threads concurrently illustrate their local memories and message passing using a shared canvas. Our tool includes visualizations of different algorithms for Scatter, Gather, ReduceScatter, AllGather, Broadcast, Reduce, AllReduce, and AlltoAll. 

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. 

Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (SymNMF) is a technique in data analysis and machine learning that approximates a symmetric matrix with a product of a nonnegative, low-rank matrix and its transpose. To design faster and more scalable algorithms for SymNMF, we develop two randomized algorithms for its computation. The first algorithm uses randomized matrix sketching to compute an initial low-rank approximation to the input matrix and proceeds to rapidly compute a SymNMF of the approximation. The second algorithm uses randomized leverage score sampling to approximately solve constrained least squares problems. Many successful methods for SymNMF rely on (approximately) solving sequences of constrained least squares problems. We prove theoretically that leverage score sampling can approximately solve nonnegative least squares problems to a chosen accuracy with high probability. Additionally, we prove sampling complexity results for previously proposed hybrid sampling techniques which deterministically include high leverage score rows. This hybrid scheme is crucial for obtaining speedups in practice. Finally, we demonstrate that both methods work well in practice by applying them to graph clustering tasks on large real world data sets. These experiments show that our methods approximately maintain solution quality and achieve significant speedups for both large dense and large sparse problems. 

Rank selection, i.e. the choice of factorization rank, is the first step in constructing Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) models. It is a long-standing problem which is not unique to NMF, but arises in most models which attempt to decompose data into its underlying components. Since these models are often used in the unsupervised setting, the rank selection problem is further complicated by the lack of ground truth labels. In this paper, we review and empirically evaluate the most commonly used schemes for NMF rank selection. 

Undergraduate algorithms courses are a natural setting for teaching many of the theoretical ideas of parallel computing. Mergesort is a fundamental sequential divide-and- conquer algorithm often analyzed in such courses. In this work, we present a visualization tool to help demonstrate a novel PRAM algorithm for mergesort that is work efficient and has polylogarithmic span. Our implementation uses the Thread-Safe Graphics Library, which has an existing visualization of parallel mergesort. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm has better work and span than the one currently visualized. 

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. 

In this work, we design, analyze, and optimize sequential and shared-memory parallel algorithms for partitioned local depths (PaLD). Given a set of data points and pairwise distances, PaLD is a method for identifying strength of pairwise relationships based on relative distances, enabling the identification of strong ties within dense and sparse communities even if their sizes and within-community absolute distances vary greatly. We design two algorithmic variants that perform community structure analysis through triplet comparisons of pairwise distances. We present theoretical analyses of computation and communication costs and prove that the sequential algorithms are communication optimal, up to constant factors. We introduce performance optimization strategies that yield sequential speedups of up to 29x over a baseline sequential implementation and parallel speedups of up to 26.2x over optimized sequential implementations using up to 32 threads on an Intel multicore CPU. 

Joint Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (JointNMF) is a hybrid method for mining information from datasets that contain both feature and connection information. We propose distributed-memory parallelizations of three algorithms for solving the JointNMF problem based on Alternating Nonnegative Least Squares, Projected Gradient Descent, and Projected Gauss-Newton. We extend well-known communication-avoiding algorithms using a single processor grid case to our coupled case on two processor grids. We demonstrate the scalability of the algorithms on up to 960 cores (40 nodes) with 60\% parallel efficiency. The more sophisticated Alternating Nonnegative Least Squares (ANLS) and Gauss-Newton variants outperform the first-order gradient descent method in reducing the objective on large-scale problems. We perform a topic modelling task on a large corpus of academic papers that consists of over 37 million paper abstracts and nearly a billion citation relationships, demonstrating the utility and scalability of the methods. 

In this paper, we focus on the parallel communication cost of multiplying a matrix with its transpose, known as a symmetric rank-k update (SYRK). SYRK requires half the computation of general matrix multiplication because of the symmetry of the output matrix. Recent work (Beaumont et al., SPAA '22) has demonstrated that the sequential I/O complexity of SYRK is also a constant factor smaller than that of general matrix multiplication. Inspired by this progress, we establish memory-independent parallel communication lower bounds for SYRK with smaller constants than general matrix multiplication, and we show that these constants are tight by presenting communication-optimal algorithms. The crux of the lower bound proof relies on extending a key geometric inequality to symmetric computations and analytically solving a constrained nonlinear optimization problem. The optimal algorithms use a triangular blocking scheme for parallel distribution of the symmetric output matrix and corresponding computation. 

Communication lower bounds have long been established for matrix multiplication algorithms. However, most methods of asymptotic analysis have either ignored the constant factors or not obtained the tightest possible values. Recent work has demonstrated that more careful analysis improves the best known constants for some classical matrix multiplication lower bounds and helps to identify more efficient algorithms that match the leading-order terms in the lower bounds exactly and improve practical performance. The main result of this work is the establishment of memory-independent communication lower bounds with tight constants for parallel matrix multiplication. Our constants improve on previous work in each of three cases that depend on the relative sizes of the aspect ratios of the matrices.