A comparative study of null-space factorizations for sparse symmetric saddle point systems

Abstract

Null-space methods for solving saddle point systems of equations have long been used to transform an indefinite system into a symmetric positive definite one of smaller dimension. A number of independent works in the literature have identified that we can interpret a null-space method as a matrix factorization. We review these findings, highlight links between them, and bring them into a unified framework. We also investigate the suitability of using null-space factorizations to derive sparse direct methods, and present numerical results for both practical and academic problems