Section: Application Domains

Applications of sparse direct solvers

Sparse direct (multifrontal) solvers have a wide range of applications as they are used at the heart of many numerical methods in computational science: whether a model uses finite elements or finite differences, or requires the optimization of a complex linear or nonlinear function, one often ends up solving a linear system of equations involving sparse matrices. There are therefore a number of application fields, among which some of the ones cited by the users of our sparse direct solver Mumps (see Section  6.1 ) are: structural mechanics, biomechanics, medical image processing, tomography, geophysics, electromagnetism, fluid dynamics, econometric models, oil reservoir simulation, magneto-hydro-dynamics, chemistry, acoustics, glaciology, astrophysics, circuit simulation, and work on hybrid direct-iterative methods.