sparse solver

Summary:

I am thinking of informally conducting a specific case-study concerning the FEA solvers. The reference problem is a very simple but typical problem from stress analysis, leading of course to the linear systems: Ax = b and Ax = Lx.

I seek advice as to what software libraries currently available in the public domain would be best to use---the ones that would be fastest in terms of execution time for the reference problem.

I have a personal and longer-term research interest with certain issues related to the solvers technologies.

I would like to share the following information to all the iMechanica users interested in using TAUCS a library of sparse linear solvers. TAUCS is among the most used libraries of sparse linear solvers and, to my knowledge, its closest equivalent library is SuperLU. For your reference, TAUCS is used in the commercial software Mathematica by Wolfram Research. Its source code can be downloaded from

http://www.tau.ac.il/~stoledo/taucs