The Panel Clustering Technique for the Boundary Element Method (Invited contribution)

In contrast to usual finite element methods the boundary element method leads to systems with full matrices. This fact seems to require much computational work for the definition of the matrix entries, for the solution of the system, and, in particular, for the matrix-vector multiplication, which always occurs as an elementary operation. In this paper a method for the approximate matrix-vector multiplication is described which requires much less arithmetical work. In addition, the storage requirements are strongly reduced.