Efficient Solution of Electromagnetic Scattering Problems Using Multilevel Adaptive Cross Approximation and LU Factorization

The multilevel adaptive cross approximation (MLACA), previously described in the literature, extends the single-level ACA with a recursive multilevel algorithm that significantly improves compression of off-diagonal matrix blocks resulting from electromagnetic integral equations (IE) discretized via the method of moments (MoM). In this article, the MLACA approach is extended and applied to a direct solution of the MoM matrix system via LU factorization. It will be shown through numerical experiments that the off-diagonal LU blocks are also compressible using MLACA, yielding a compression rate superior to the single-level ACA and a memory complexity of O(N
^4/3
log N). In addition, the MLACA LU block updates are performed in rank-reduced form, yielding a very efficient software implementation via a Level 3 BLAS optimized for the CPU or GPU.