A parallel radix‐4 block cyclic reduction algorithm

A conventional block cyclic reduction algorithm operates by halving the size of the linear system at each reduction step, that is, the algorithm is a radix‐2 method. An algorithm analogous to the block cyclic reduction known as the radix‐q partial solution variant of the cyclic reduction (PSCR) method allows the use of higher radix numbers and is thus more suitable for parallel architectures as it requires fever reduction steps. This paper presents an alternative and more intuitive way of deriving a radix‐4 block cyclic reduction method for systems with a coefficient matrix of the form tridiag{ ? I,D, ? I}. This is performed by modifying an existing radix‐2 block cyclic reduction method. The resulting algorithm is then parallelized by using the partial fraction technique. The parallel variant is demonstrated to be less computationally expensive when compared to the radix‐2 block cyclic reduction method in the sense that the total number of emerging subproblems is reduced. The method is also shown to be numerically stable and equivalent to the radix‐4 PSCR method. The numerical results archived correspond to the theoretical expectations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.