IMPROVEMENT OF THE SPARSE MATRICES STORAGE ROUTINES FOR LARGE FEM CALCULATIONS

Efficient memory handling is one of the key issues that engineers and programmers face in developing software for numerical analysis such as the Finite Element Method. This method operates on huge matrices that have a large number of zero coefficients which waste memory, so it is necessary to save it and to work only with non-zero coefficients using so called "SPARSE" matrices. Analysis of two methods used for the improvement of "SPARSE" matrix creation is presented in this paper and their pseudo code is given. Comparison is made on a wide range of problem sizes. Results show that "indexing" method is superior to "dotting" method both in memory usage and in elapsed time.