The Multifrontal Solution of Unsymmetric Sets of Linear Equations

Abstract

We show that general sparse sets of linear equations whose pattern is symmetric (or nearly so) can be solved efficiently by a multifrontal technique. The main advantages are that the analysis time is small compared to the factorization time and that analysis can be performed in a predictable amount of storage. Additionally, there is scope for extra performance during factorization and solution on a vector or parallel machine. We show performance figures for examples run on the IBM 3081K and CRAY-1 computers.