“Interpolated Factored Green Function” Method for accelerated solution of Scattering Problems

Abstract This paper presents a novel Interpolated Factored Green Function method (IFGF) for the accelerated evaluation of the integral operators in scattering theory and other areas. Like existing acceleration methods in these fields, the IFGF algorithm evaluates the action of Green function-based integral operators at a cost of O ( N log ⁡ N ) operations for an N-point surface mesh. The IFGF strategy, which leads to an extremely simple algorithm, capitalizes on slow variations inherent in a certain Green function analytic factor, which is analytic up to and including infinity, and which therefore allows for accelerated evaluation of fields produced by groups of sources on the basis of a recursive application of classical interpolation methods. Unlike other approaches, the IFGF method does not utilize the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and is thus better suited than other methods for efficient parallelization in distributed-memory computer systems. Only a serial implementation of the algorithm is considered in this paper, however, whose efficiency in terms of memory and speed is illustrated by means of a variety of numerical experiments—including a 43 min., single-core operator evaluation (on 10 GB of peak memory), with a relative error of 1.5 × 10 − 2 , for a problem of acoustic size of 512 wavelengths.