A Fast Implementation of the Minimum Degree Algorithm Using Quotient Graphs

This paper describes a very fast implementation of the m~n~mum degree algorithm, which is an effective heuristm scheme for fmding low-fill ordermgs for sparse positive definite matrices. This implementation has two important features: first, in terms of speed, it is competitive with other unplementations known to the authors, and, second, its storage requirements are independent of the amount of fill suffered by the matrix during its symbolic factorization. Some numerical experiments which compare the performance of this new scheme to some existing minimum degree programs are provided.