Composite Numerical Methods and Scalable Tile Algorithms

Abstract

Numerical modeling is an important tool when studying various natural processes and phenomena. Fractional diffusion can be used for modeling many processes in biology, for example in silico experiments in molecular biology and medicine design, protein diffusion within cells, complex media geometry, etc. The problem is usually reduced to a system of linear algebraic equations and in many cases this system has a dense coefficient matrix. Numerically solving such problems with the traditional LU factorization is a computationally expensive endeavour - $O(n^3)$. In this paper we explore the use of a hierarchical compression method based on Hierarchical Semi-Separable compression and ULV-like factorization from the STRUctured Matrices PACKage (STRUMPACK) software library for a flow around airfoils problem discretized with Boundary Element Method and fractional diffusion problem discretized with the Finite Element Method. The HSS based method promises better overall computational complexity of $O(r^2n)$ for problems with suitable structure - low rank off-diagonal blocks. Here $r$ is the maximum rank of the off-diagonal blocks. We present analysis of the performance and accuracy of the HSS based method and compare it with the state of the art direct LU factorization solvers. This paper is based on the PhD thesis Composite Numerical Methods and Scalable Tile Algorithms of the author defended on 17.05.2022 in the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.