SPEX Cholesky, SPEX LDL, and SPEX Backslash are software packages for exactly solving sparse linear systems, \(A\mathbf{x}=\mathbf{b}\) . SPEX Cholesky, used for symmetric positive definite (SPD) systems, computes an integral Cholesky factorization to solve the system \(A\mathbf{x}=\mathbf{b}\) in time proportional to arithmetic work—to date the only algorithm for SPD linear systems with this property. SPEX LDL extends SPEX Cholesky for symmetric negative definite and symmetric indefinite matrices with exclusively non-zero leading principal minors. SPEX Backslash is a general-purpose exact solver that automatically determines the best ordering and factorization to exactly solve the system \(A\mathbf{x}=\mathbf{b}\) . Computationally, we test the accuracy of MATLAB sparse backslash, the state-of-the-art collection of sparse matrix solvers, revealing it is near perfect for 87% of the tested instances. In addition, we show that SPEX Cholesky outperforms alternate exact solvers in runtime; specifically, SPEX Cholesky outperforms the exact solver Linbox and exact LU factorization on 70% and 92% of tested instances, respectively. Each of SPEX Cholesky, SPEX LDL, and SPEX Backslash is implemented in C and is accompanied by easy-to-use Python and MATLAB interfaces. They are distributed via GitHub, as a component of the SPEX software package, and as component of SuiteSparse.

SPEX Left LU is a software package for exactly solving unsymmetric sparse linear systems. As a component of the sparse exact (SPEX) software package, SPEX Left LU can be applied to any input matrix, A , whose entries are integral, rational, or decimal, and provides a solution to the system \( Ax = b \) , which is either exact or accurate to user-specified precision. SPEX Left LU preorders the matrix A with a user-specified fill-reducing ordering and computes a left-looking LU factorization with the special property that each operation used to compute the L and U matrices is integral. Notable additional applications of this package include benchmarking the stability and accuracy of state-of-the-art linear solvers and determining whether singular-to-double-precision matrices are indeed singular. Computationally, this article evaluates the impact of several novel pivoting schemes in exact arithmetic, benchmarks the exact iterative solvers within Linbox, and benchmarks the accuracy of MATLAB sparse backslash. Most importantly, it is shown that SPEX Left LU outperforms the exact iterative solvers in run time on easy instances and in stability as the iterative solver fails on a sizeable subset of the tested (both easy and hard) instances. The SPEX Left LU package is written in ANSI C, comes with a MATLAB interface, and is distributed via GitHub, as a component of the SPEX software package, and as a component of SuiteSparse.

Exact solving of systems of linear equations (SLEs) is a fundamental subroutine within number theory, formal verification of mathematical proofs, and exact-precision mathematical programming. Moreover, efficient exact SLE solution methods could be valuable for a growing body of science and engineering applications where current fixed-precision standards have been deemed inadequate. This article contains key derivations relating, and computational tests comparing, two exact direct solution frameworks: roundoff-error-free (REF) LU factorization and rational arithmetic LU factorization. Specifically, both approaches solve the linear system Ax = b by factoring the matrix A into the product of a lower triangular (L) and upper triangular (U) matrix, A = LU . Most significantly, the featured findings reveal that the integer-preserving REF factorization framework solves dense SLEs one order of magnitude faster than the exact rational arithmetic approach while requiring half the memory. Since rational LU is utilized for basic solution validation in exact linear and mixed-integer programming, these results offer preliminary evidence of the potential of the REF factorization framework to be utilized within this specific context. Additionally, this article develops and analyzes an efficient streamlined version of Edmonds’s Q-matrix approach that can be implemented as another basic solution validation approach. Further experiments demonstrate that the REF factorization framework also outperforms this alternative integer-preserving approach in terms of memory requirements and computational effort. General purpose codes to solve dense SLEs exactly via any of the aforementioned methods have been made available to the research and academic communities.