Automatic Synthesis of Low-Complexity Translation Operators for the Fast Multipole Method

Abstract

We demonstrate a new, hybrid symbolic-numerical method for the automatic synthesis of all families of translation operators required for the execution of the Fast Multipole Method (FMM). Our method is applicable in any dimensionality and to any translation-invariant kernel. The Fast Multipole Method, of course, is the leading approach for attaining linear complexity in the evaluation of long-range (e.g. Coulomb) many-body interactions. Low complexity in translation operators for the Fast Multipole Method (FMM) is usually achieved by algorithms specialized for a potential obeying a specific partial differential equation (PDE). Absent a PDE or specialized algorithms, Taylor series based FMMs or kernel-independent FMM have been used, at asymptotically higher expense. When symbolically provided with a constant-coefficient elliptic PDE obeyed by the potential, our algorithm can automatically synthesize translation operators requiring $\mathrm{O}(p^d)$ operations, where $p$ is the expansion order and $d$ is dimension, compared with $\mathrm{O}(p^{2d})$ operations in a naive approach carried out on (Cartesian) Taylor expansions. This is achieved by using a compression scheme that asymptotically reduces the number of terms in the Taylor expansion and then operating directly on this ``compressed'' representation. Judicious exploitation of shared subexpressions permits formation, translation, and evaluation of local and multipole expansions to be performed in $\mathrm{O}(p^{d})$ operations, while an FFT-based scheme permits multipole-to-local translations in $\mathrm{O}(p^{d-1}\log(p))$ operations. We demonstrate computational scaling of code generation and evaluation as well as numerical accuracy through numerical experiments on a number of potentials from classical physics