On the forward stability of a modified `stride of 3' reduction method (Q1334540)

An extension of cyclic reduction for tridiagonal systems is presented. While in cyclic reduction in each step the unknowns with odd numbers are eliminated and the remaining unknowns have ``stride 2'', the authors propose a similar elimination scheme that eliminates 2 out of 3 consecutive unknowns and produce a reduced system of stride 3. The error analysis shows that for diagonally dominant matrices the off diagonal elements decrease fast in each reduction step so that in this case (as also in cyclic reduction) the method can be viewed as an iterative method.