Frontal solver (original) (raw)

A frontal solver, conceived by Bruce Irons, is an approach to solving sparse linear systems which is used extensively in finite element analysis. It is a variant of Gauss elimination that automatically avoids a large number of operations involving zero terms. A multifrontal solver of Duff and is an improvement of the frontal solver that uses several independent fronts at the same time. The fronts can be worked on by different processors, which enables parallel computing. See for a monograph exposition.