text: We present a solver for the 2D high-frequency Helmholtz equation in heterogeneous acoustic media, with online parallel complexity that scales optimally as @math , where @math is the number of volume unknowns, and @math is the number of processors, as long as @math grows at most like a small fractional power of @math . The solver decomposes the domain into layers, and uses transmission conditions in boundary integral form to explicitly define "polarized traces", i.e., up- and down-going waves sampled at interfaces. Local direct solvers are used in each layer to precompute traces of local Green's functions in an embarrassingly parallel way (the offline part), and incomplete Green's formulas are used to propagate interface data in a sweeping fashion, as a preconditioner inside a GMRES loop (the online part). Adaptive low-rank partitioning of the integral kernels is used to speed up their application to interface data. The method uses second-order finite differences. The complexity scalings are empirical but motivated by an analysis of ranks of off-diagonal blocks of oscillatory integrals. They continue to hold in the context of standard geophysical community models such as BP and Marmousi 2, where convergence occurs in 5 to 10 GMRES iterations.
  @cite_20: SUMMARY We present a domain decomposition solver for the 2D Helmholtz equation, with a special choice of integral transmission condition that involves polarizing the waves into oneway components. This refinement of the transmission condition is the key to combining local direct solves into an efficient iterative scheme, which can then be deployed in a highperformance computing environment. The method involves an expensive, but embarrassingly parallel precomputation of local Green’s functions, and a fast online computation of layer potentials in partitioned low-rank form. The online part has sequential complexity that scales sublinearly with respect to the number of volume unknowns, even in the high-frequency regime. The favorable complexity scaling continues to hold in the context of low-order finite difference schemes for standard community models such as BP and Marmousi2, where convergence occurs in 5 to 10 GMRES iterations.
summary: Finally, an earlier version of the work presented in this paper can be found in @cite_20 , in which the notion of polarized traces using Green's representation formula was first introduced, obtaining favorable scalings;