Sparse matrix element topology with application to AMG(e) and preconditioning<FNR></FNR><FN>This article is a US Government work and is in the public domain in the USA </FN>.

This paper defines topology relations of elements treated as overlapping lists of nodes. In particular, the element topology makes use of element faces, element vertices and boundary faces which coincide with the actual (geometrical) faces, vertices and boundary faces in the case of true finite elements. The element topology is used in an agglomeration algorithm to produce agglomerated elements (a non-overlapping partition of the original elements) and their topology is then constructed, thus allowing for recursion. The main part of the algorithms is based on operations on Boolean sparse matrices and the implementation of the algorithms can utilize any available (parallel) sparse matrix format. Applications of the sparse matrix element topology to AMGe (algebraic multigrid for finite element problems), including elementwise constructions of coarse non-linear finite element operators are outlined. An algorithm to generate a block nested dissection ordering of the nodes for generally unstructured finite element meshes is given as well. The coarsening of the element topology is illustrated on a number of fine-grid unstructured triangular meshes. Published in 2002 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]