Structured Multifrontal Sparse Solver

Abstract

StruMF is an algebraic structured preconditioner for the interative solution of large sparse linear systems. The preconditioner corresponds to a multifrontal variant of sparse LU factorization in which some dense blocks of the factors are approximated with low-rank matrices. It is algebraic in that it only requires the linear system itself, and the approximation threshold that determines the accuracy of individual low-rank approximations. Favourable rank properties are obtained using a block partitioning which is a refinement of the partitioning induced by nested dissection ordering.