The paper introduces the sweeping preconditioner, which is highly efficient for iterative solutions of the variable coefficient Helmholtz equation including very high frequency problems. The first central idea of this novel approach is to construct an approximate factorization of the discretized Helmholtz equation by sweeping the domain layer by layer, starting from an absorbing layer or boundary condition. Given this specific order of factorization, the second central idea of this approach is to represent the intermediate matrices in the hierarchical matrix framework. In two dimensions, both the construction and the application of the preconditioners are of linear complexity. The GMRES solver with the resulting preconditioner converges in an amazingly small number of iterations, which is essentially independent of the number of unknowns. This approach is also extended to the three dimensional case with some success. Numerical results are provided in both two and three dimensions to demonstrate the efficiency of this new approach.
Linear systems which originate from the simulation of wave propagation phenomena can be very difficult to solve by iterative methods. These systems are typically complex valued and they tend to be highly indefinite, which renders the standard ILU-based preconditioners ineffective. This paper presents a study of ways to enhance standard preconditioners by altering the diagonal by imaginary shifts. Prior work indicates that modifying the diagonal entries during the incomplete factorization process, by adding to it purely imaginary values can improve the quality of the preconditioner in a substantial way. Here we propose simple algebraic heuristics to perform the shifting and test these techniques with the ARMS and ILUT preconditioners. Comparisons are made with applications stemming from the diffraction of an acoustic wave incident on a bounded obstacle (governed by the Helmholtz Wave Equation).  We present an incomplete LU preconditioner for solving discretized Helmholtz problems. The preconditioner is based on an analytic factorization of the Helmholtz operator. This allows us to take the physical properties of the acoustics problem modeled by the Helmholtz equation into account in the preconditioner. We show how the parameters in the preconditioner can be chosen in order to make it effective. Numerical experiments show that the new preconditioner leads to convergent iterative methods even for large wave numbers, and it outperforms classical ILU preconditioners by a large margin.