A new approximate matrix factorization for implicit time integration in air pollution modeling

Implicit time stepping typically requires solution of one or several linear systems with a matrix I−τJ per time step where J is the Jacobian matrix. If solution of these systems is expensive, replacing I−τJ with its approximate matrix factorization (AMF) (I−τR)(I−τV), R+V=J, often leads to a good compromise between stability and accuracy of the time integration on the one hand and its efficiency on the other hand. For example, in air pollution modeling, AMF has been successfully used in the framework of Rosenbrock schemes. The standard AMF gives an approximation to I−τJ with the error τ2RV, which can be significant in norm. In this paper we propose a new AMF. In assumption that −V is an M-matrix, the error of the new AMF can be shown to have an upper bound τ||R||, while still being asymptotically $O(\tau^2)$. This new AMF, called AMF+, is equal in costs to standard AMF and, as both analysis and numerical experiments reveal, provides a better accuracy. We also report on our experience with another, cheaper AMF and with AMF-preconditioned GMRES

An efficient multi-core implementation of a novel HSS-structured multifrontal solver using randomized sampling

We present a sparse linear system solver that is based on a multifrontal variant of Gaussian elimination, and exploits low-rank approximation of the resulting dense frontal matrices. We use hierarchically semiseparable (HSS) matrices, which have low-rank off-diagonal blocks, to approximate the frontal matrices. For HSS matrix construction, a randomized sampling algorithm is used together with interpolative decompositions. The combination of the randomized compression with a fast ULV HSS factorization leads to a solver with lower computational complexity than the standard multifrontal method for many applications, resulting in speedups up to 7 fold for problems in our test suite. The implementation targets many-core systems by using task parallelism with dynamic runtime scheduling. Numerical experiments show performance improvements over state-of-the-art sparse direct solvers. The implementation achieves high performance and good scalability on a range of modern shared memory parallel systems, including the Intel Xeon Phi (MIC). The code is part of a software package called STRUMPACK -- STRUctured Matrices PACKage, which also has a distributed memory component for dense rank-structured matrices