Brief announcement

As the gap between the cost of communication (i.e., data movement) and computation continues to grow, the importance of pursuing algorithms which minimize communication also increases. Toward this end, we seek asymptotic communication lower bounds for general memory models and classes of algorithms. Recent work has established lower bounds for a wide set of linear algebra algorithms on a sequential machine and on a parallel machine with identical processors. This work extends these previous bounds to a heterogeneous model in which processors access data and perform floating point operations at differing speeds. We also present an algorithm for dense matrix multiplication which attains the lower bound.