Abstract

Most of the current techniques for the direct solution of linear equations are based on supernodal or multifrontal approaches. An important feature of these methods is that arithmetic is performed on dense submatrices and Level 2 and Level 3 BLAS (matrixvector and matrix-matrix kernels) can be used. Both sparse LU and QR factorizations can be implemented within this framework. Partitioning and ordering techniques have seen major activity in recent years. We discuss bisection and multisection techniques, extensions to orderings to block triangular form, and recent improvements and modifications to standard orderings such as minimum degree. We also study advances in the solution of indefinite systems and sparse least-squares problems. The desire to exploit parallelism has been responsible for many of the developments in direct methods for sparse matrices over the last ten years. We examine this aspect in some detail, illustrating how current techniques have been developed or ...

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