A fast direct solver for a class of 3-D elliptic partial differential equation with variable coefficient

Beibei Huang, Bin Tu, Benzhuo Lu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose a direct solver for the three-dimensional Poisson equation with a variable coefficient, and an algorithm to directly solve the associated sparse linear systems that exploits the sparsity pattern of the coefficient matrix. Introducing some appropriate finite difference operators, we derive a second-order scheme for the solver, and then two suitable high-order compact schemes are also discussed. For a cube containing N nodes, the solver requires O(N 3/2log 2 N) arithmetic operations and O(N log N) memory to store the necessary information. Its efficiency is illustrated with examples, and the numerical results are analysed.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1148-1162
Number of pages15
JournalCommunications in Computational Physics
Volume12
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2012

Keywords

  • Direct method
  • Discrete laplace operator
  • Fast matrix inversion
  • Fast solver

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

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