University of Florida Sparse Matrix Collection

The University of Florida Sparse Matrix Collection is a large, widely available, and actively growing set of sparse matrices that arise in real applications. Its matrices cover a wide spectrum of problem domains, both those arising from problems with underlying 2D or 3D geometry: structural engineering, computational fluid dynamics, model reduction, electromagnetics, semiconductor devices, thermodynamics, materials, acoustics, computer graphics/vision, robotics/kinematics, and other discretizations; and those that typically do not have such geometry: optimization, circuit simulation, networks and graphs (including web connectivity matrices), economic and financial modeling, theoretical and quantum chemistry, chemical process simulation, mathematics and statistics, and power networks. As of March 2007, the collection contains 1840 sparse matrix problems (about 8GB total, as *.mat files).

Matrices such as these are crucial for the development and testing of sparse matrix algorithms (randomly generated sparse matrix are almost completely useless, resulting in misleading performance results).

With the easy-to-use UFget interface, the MATLAB statement "UFget(matrixname)" downloads the matrix (if not already downloaded), caches it locally, and loads it into the MATLAB workspace.