An experimental comparison of some direct sparse solver packages

This paper reports the results of an empirical comparison of a set of commonly used software packages for solving general sparse systems of linear equations. The packages included in this study are MUMPS, S+, SPOOLES, SuperLU, UMFPACK, and WSMP. The study includes results from message-passing and shared-memory parallel versions of the packages, where applicable. All experiments were conducted on a 24-processor IBM RS6000 model S80. To the best of our knowledge, this is a first comparison of all these software packages on the same hardware and the same set of real industrial problems. Therefore, we hope that this paper will serve as a useful reference for practitioners who are often faced with the decision of choosing one of the packages for their applications.