Review of Storage Techniques for Sparse Matrices

Abstract

This paper reviews the current state of knowledge of the storage formats for sparse linear systems. Here we consider the ways developed so far for storing a sparse matrix and their quoted effects on computational speed. The main idea behind these formats involves keeping both the indices and the non-zero elements in the sparse matrix in a single data structure. These specialized schemes not only save storage but also yield computational savings. Since the locations of the non-zero elements in the matrix are known explicitly, unnecessary computations involving zeros can be avoided. Thus the use of these formats reduces additional memory required in the usual indexing based storage schemes and gives promising performance improvements