New method of pivoting in the block solvers for large banded linear equation systems

New method of pivoting applicable to banded unsymmetric linear equation systems has been introduced. It limits the fill-in and nearly preserves the basic band structure. Two solvers, using a new pivoting method, have been developed. One of these solvers uses elegant indirect addressing and the second relies on explicit shifting of data and explicit pivoting. Both solvers have been written in the C language for two popular UNIX platforms (PC486 and Sun's Sparc5). The details of solvers implementation have been described comprehensively. The performance of both solvers has been analysed theoretically. Quantitative results of the test runs on both platforms have been presented.