About the name of the solver: NICS is the name of our lab in Tsinghua University ---- Nano-scale Integrated Circuits and Systems.
Introduction: NICSLU is a high-performance and robust software package for solving large-scale sparse linear systems of equations (Ax = b) on multi-core shared-memory machines. It is written by C, and can be easily used in C/C++ programs. NICSLU is well suited for SPICE-based circuit simulation problems. There is no limitation of matrix dimension that NICSLU can handle with two exceptions: 1) your computer memory is not big enough; 2) you are using a 32-bit library.
Performance of NICSLU: Sequential NICSLU is about 2X faster than KLU. Parallel NICSLU is about 10X faster than KLU. NICSLU is 1.5-2X faster than PARDISO. NICSLU is much faster than UMFPACK and SuperLU. Note that all these speedups are average values based on our evaluations on circuit simulation problems. Please download results.pdf for the results and comparisons. NICSLU is also proven to be high-performance in several state-of-the-art SPICE-based commercial simulators from several famous EDA companies.
This library provides Windows-based DLLs. If you need Linux libraries, please contact Xiaoming Chen with your detailed system information.
Authors' information: Please visit Xiaoming Chen's personal page or Yu Wang's group page.
Please contact Xiaoming Chen for commercial licenses. Please also note that the key techniques of NICSLU are protected by Chinese patents.
You can use NICSLU for free. Once the license is expired, please contact Xiaoming Chen to get a new license or download a new version. Please cite one or more of our papers when you publish your research if you have used NICSLU in your research.
NICSLU-OPEN is a basic and open-source version of NICSLU. NICSLU-OPEN only has the basic parallel factorization feature of NICSLU, but does not have many new features including parallel supernodal factorization, pivoting reduction, approximate minimum fill-in ordering, etc. NICSLU-OPEN has separated real number and complex number inferfaces.
The last update of NICSLU-OPEN is in Aug 2013. It has known bugs. But we will not update NICSLU-OPEN any more. Please see https://github.com/chenxm1986/nicslu-open.
NICSLU-OPEN is released under the GNU LGPL lincense.