English

A fast direct solver for nonlocal operators in wavelet coordinates

Numerical Analysis 2021-02-03 v1 Numerical Analysis

Abstract

In this article, we consider fast direct solvers for nonlocal operators. The pivotal idea is to combine a wavelet representation of the system matrix, yielding a quasi-sparse matrix, with the nested dissection ordering scheme. The latter drastically reduces the fill-in during the factorization of the system matrix by means of a Cholesky decomposition or an LU decomposition, respectively. This way, we end up with the exact inverse of the compressed system matrix with only a moderate increase of the number of nonzero entries in the matrix. To illustrate the efficacy of the approach, we conduct numerical experiments for different highly relevant applications of nonlocal operators: We consider (i) the direct solution of boundary integral equations in three spatial dimensions, issuing from the polarizable continuum model, (ii) a parabolic problem for the fractional Laplacian in integral form and (iii) the fast simulation of Gaussian random fields.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.01541,
  title  = {A fast direct solver for nonlocal operators in wavelet coordinates},
  author = {Helmut Harbrecht and Michael Multerer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.01541},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:49:23.137Z