Computational complexity and memory usage for multi-frontal direct   solvers in structured mesh finite elements
  The multi-frontal direct solver is the state-of-the-art algorithm for the direct solution of sparse linear systems. This paper provides computational complexity and memory usage estimates for the application of the multi-frontal direct solver algorithm on linear systems resulting from B-spline-based isogeometric finite elements, where the mesh is a structured grid. Specifically we provide the estimates for systems resulting from $C^{p-1}$ polynomial B-spline spaces and compare them to those obtained using $C^0$ spaces. 
Nathan Collier, David Pardo, Maciej Paszynski, Victor M. Calo
cs.NA math.NA