146 research outputs found
Improving multifrontal methods by means of block low-rank representations
Submitted for publication to SIAMMatrices coming from elliptic Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) have been shown to have a low-rank property: well defined off-diagonal blocks of their Schur complements can be approximated by low-rank products. Given a suitable ordering of the matrix which gives to the blocks a geometrical meaning, such approximations can be computed using an SVD or a rank-revealing QR factorization. The resulting representation offers a substantial reduction of the memory requirement and gives efficient ways to perform many of the basic dense algebra operations. Several strategies have been proposed to exploit this property. We propose a low-rank format called Block Low-Rank (BLR), and explain how it can be used to reduce the memory footprint and the complexity of direct solvers for sparse matrices based on the multifrontal method. We present experimental results that show how the BLR format delivers gains that are comparable to those obtained with hierarchical formats such as Hierarchical matrices (H matrices) and Hierarchically Semi-Separable (HSS matrices) but provides much greater flexibility and ease of use which are essential in the context of a general purpose, algebraic solver
Hierarchical Lowrank Arithmetic with Binary Compression
With lowrank approximation the storage requirements for dense data are
reduced down to linear complexity and with the addition of hierarchy this also
works for data without global lowrank properties. However, the lowrank factors
itself are often still stored using double precision numbers. Newer approaches
exploit the different IEEE754 floating point formats available nowadays in a
mixed precision approach. However, these formats show a significant gap in
storage (and accuracy), e.g. between half, single and double precision. We
therefore look beyond these standard formats and use adaptive compression for
storing the lowrank and dense data and investigate how that affects the
arithmetic of such matrices
A distributed-memory parallel algorithm for discretized integral equations using Julia
Boundary value problems involving elliptic PDEs such as the Laplace and the
Helmholtz equations are ubiquitous in physics and engineering. Many such
problems have alternative formulations as integral equations that are
mathematically more tractable than their PDE counterparts. However, the
integral equation formulation poses a challenge in solving the dense linear
systems that arise upon discretization. In cases where iterative methods
converge rapidly, existing methods that draw on fast summation schemes such as
the Fast Multipole Method are highly efficient and well established. More
recently, linear complexity direct solvers that sidestep convergence issues by
directly computing an invertible factorization have been developed. However,
storage and compute costs are high, which limits their ability to solve
large-scale problems in practice. In this work, we introduce a
distributed-memory parallel algorithm based on an existing direct solver named
``strong recursive skeletonization factorization.'' The analysis of its
parallel scalability applies generally to a class of existing methods that
exploit the so-called strong admissibility. Specifically, we apply low-rank
compression to certain off-diagonal matrix blocks in a way that minimizes data
movement. Given a compression tolerance, our method constructs an approximate
factorization of a discretized integral operator (dense matrix), which can be
used to solve linear systems efficiently in parallel. Compared to iterative
algorithms, our method is particularly suitable for problems involving
ill-conditioned matrices or multiple right-hand sides. Large-scale numerical
experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance of our implementation
using the Julia language
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