Reduced Multiplicative (BURA-MR) and Additive (BURA-AR) Best Uniform Rational Approximation Methods and Algorithms for Fractional Elliptic Equations

Numerical methods for spectral space-fractional elliptic equations are studied. The boundary value problem is defined in a bounded domain of general geometry, Ω⊂Rd, d∈{1,2,3}. Assuming that the finite difference method (FDM) or the finite element method (FEM) is applied for discretization in space, the approximate solution is described by the system of linear algebraic equations Aαu=f, α∈(0,1). Although matrix A∈RN×N is sparse, symmetric and positive definite (SPD), matrix Aα is dense. The recent achievements in the field are determined by methods that reduce the original non-local problem to solving k auxiliary linear systems with sparse SPD matrices that can be expressed as positive diagonal perturbations of A. The present study is in the spirit of the BURA method, based on the best uniform rational approximation rα,k(t) of degree k of tα in the interval [0,1]. The introduced additive BURA-AR and multiplicative BURA-MR methods follow the observation that the matrices of part of the auxiliary systems possess very different properties. As a result, solution methods with substantially improved computational complexity are developed. In this paper, we present new theoretical characterizations of the BURA parameters, which gives a theoretical justification for the new methods. The theoretical estimates are supported by a set of representative numerical tests. The new theoretical and experimental results raise the question of whether the almost optimal estimate of the computational complexity of the BURA method in the form O(Nlog2N) can be improved.