Computational Costs of Multi-Frontal Direct Solvers with Analysis-Suitable T-Splines

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the computational cost of a multi-frontal direct solver used for the factorization of matrices resulting from a discretization of isogeometric analysis with T-splines, and analysis-suitable T-splines. We start from model projection or model heat transfer problems discretized over two-dimensional meshes, either uniformly refined or refined towards a point or an edge. These grids preserve several symmetries and they are the building blocks of more complicated grids constructed during adaptive isotropic refinement procedures. A large class of computational problems construct meshes refined towards point or edge singularities. We propose an ordering that permutes the matrix in a way that the computational cost of a multi-frontal solver executed on adaptive grids is linear. We show that analysis-suitable T-splines with our ordering, besides having other well-known advantages, also significantly reduce the computational cost of factorization with the multi-frontal direct solver. Namely, the factorization with N T-splines of order p over meshes refined to a point has a linear O(Np4) cost, and the factorization with T-splines on meshes refined to an edge has O(N2pp2) cost. We compare the execution time of the multi-frontal solver with our ordering to the Approximate Minimum Degree (AMD) and Cuthill–McKee orderings available in Octave.

Keywords

• isogeometric analysis
• computational cost
• multi-frontal direct solver
• T-splines
• analysis-suitable T-splines