A frontal solver for the 21st century
J. A. Scott · Communications in Numerical Methods in Engineering · 2006
In recent years there have been a number of important developments in frontal algorithms for solving the large sparse linear systems of equations that arise from finite-element problems. We report on the design of a new fully portable and efficient frontal solver for large-scale real and complex unsymmetric linear systems from finite-element problems that incorporates these developments. The new package offers both a flexible reverse communication interface and a simple to use all-in-one interface, which is designed to make the package more accessible to new users. Other key features include automatic element ordering using a state-of-the-art hybrid multilevel spectral algorithm, minimal main memory requirements, the use of high-level BLAS, and facilities to allow the solver to be used as part of a parallel multiple front solver. The performance of the new solver, which is written in Fortran 95, is illustrated using a range of problems from practical applications. The solver is available as package HSL_MA42_ELEMENT within the HSL mathematical software library and, for element problems, supersedes the well-known MA42 package. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.