INV-ASKIT: A Parallel Fast Direct Solver for Kernel Matrices

We present a parallel algorithm for computing the approximate factorization of an N-by-N kernel matrix. Once this factorization has been constructed (with N log2 N work), we can solve linear systems with this matrix with N log N work. Kernel matrices represent pairwise interactions of points in metric spaces. They appear in machine learning, approximation theory, and computational physics. Kernel matrices are typically dense (matrix multiplication scales quadratically with N) and ill-conditioned (solves can require100s of Krylov iterations). Thus, fast algorithms for matrix multiplication and factorization are critical for scalability. Recently we introduced ASKIT, a new method, which resembles N-body methods, for approximating a kernel matrix. Here we introduce INV-IASKIT, a factorization scheme based on ASKIT. We describe the new method, derive complexity estimates, and conduct an empirical study of its accuracy and scalability. We report results on real-world datasets including "COVTYPE" (0.5M points in 54dimensions), "SUSY" (4.5M points in 8 dimensions) and "MNIST"(2M points in 784 dimensions) using shared and distributed memory parallelism. In our largest run we approximately factorize a dense matrix of size 32M × 32M (generated from points in 64 dimensions) on 4,096 Sandy-Bridge cores. To our knowledge these results improve the state of the art by several orders of magnitude.