We propose an incomplete multifrontal LU -factorization (IMF) that extends supernodal multifrontal methods to incomplete factorizations. IMF can be used as a preconditioner in a Krylov-subspace method to solve large-scale sparse linear systems with an underlying element structure. Such systems arise e.g. from a finite element discretization of a partial differential equation. The fact that the element matrices are dense is exploited to increase the computational performance and the robustness of the factorization (through partial pivoting within the dense matrices). We compare IMF with the multilevel ARMS, the level of fill-in ILU, the threshold-based ILUT and the SPAI preconditioner. IMF is demonstrated to be effective on linear systems derived from two incompressible flow simulation model problems, outperforming the aforementioned preconditioners by one order-of-magnitude in one instance. The preconditioner was also applied to solve general sparse systems, without an underlying element structure. It is shown to be effective and robust on some matrices from the University of Florida sparse matrix collection and the Matrix Market, provided that an artificial element structure can be extracted that is similar to a finite element discretization.Keywords : incomplete factorization, supernodal multifrontal method, multilevel preconditioner, block LU -factorization, finite element MSC : Primary : 65F08, 65N30 Secondary : 65Y05, 65F50, 65N22.
IMF: AN INCOMPLETE MULTIFRONTAL LU-FACTORIZATION FOR ELEMENT-STRUCTURED SPARSE LINEAR SYSTEMS *NICK VANNIEUWENHOVEN ‡ AND KARL MEERBERGEN ‡ Abstract. We propose an incomplete multifrontal LU -factorization (IMF) that extends supernodal multifrontal methods to incomplete factorizations. IMF can be used as a preconditioner in a Krylov-subspace method to solve large-scale sparse linear systems with an underlying element structure. Such systems arise e.g. from a finite element discretization of a partial differential equation. The fact that the element matrices are dense is exploited to increase the computational performance and the robustness of the factorization (through partial pivoting within the dense matrices). We compare IMF with the multilevel ARMS, the level of fill-in ILU, the threshold-based ILUT and the SPAI preconditioner. IMF is demonstrated to be effective on linear systems derived from two incompressible flow simulation model problems, outperforming the aforementioned preconditioners by one order-of-magnitude in one instance. The preconditioner was also applied to solve general sparse systems, without an underlying element structure. It is shown to be effective and robust on some matrices from the University of Florida sparse matrix collection and the Matrix Market, provided that an artificial element structure can be extracted that is similar to a finite element discretization.