"Interpolated Factored Green Function" Method for accelerated solution of Scattering Problems

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Interpolated Factored Green Function (IFGF) method, a new approach for fast and parallelizable evaluation of scattering integral operators with $ ext{O}(N ext{log} N)$ complexity, demonstrated through numerical experiments.

Contribution

The IFGF method offers a simple, FFT-free acceleration technique for scattering problems, leveraging Green function analyticity for efficient recursive interpolation-based evaluation.

Findings

Achieves $ ext{O}(N ext{log} N)$ complexity in operator evaluation.

Demonstrates efficiency with a 43-minute single-core computation on large problems.

Does not rely on FFT, facilitating better parallelization.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel {\em 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 $\mathcal{O}(N\log N)$ 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 {\em 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 $1.5\times 10^{-2}$, for a problem of acoustic size of 512$\lambda$.