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SPEX Left LU is a software package for exactly solving unsymmetric sparse linear systems. As a component of the sparse exact (SPEX) software package, SPEX Left LU can be applied to any input matrix, A , whose entries are integral, rational, or decimal, and provides a solution to the system \( Ax = b \) , which is either exact or accurate to user-specified precision. SPEX Left LU preorders the matrix A with a user-specified fill-reducing ordering and computes a left-looking LU factorization with the special property that each operation used to compute the L and U matrices is integral. Notable additional applications of this package include benchmarking the stability and accuracy of state-of-the-art linear solvers and determining whether singular-to-double-precision matrices are indeed singular. Computationally, this article evaluates the impact of several novel pivoting schemes in exact arithmetic, benchmarks the exact iterative solvers within Linbox, and benchmarks the accuracy of MATLAB sparse backslash. Most importantly, it is shown that SPEX Left LU outperforms the exact iterative solvers in run time on easy instances and in stability as the iterative solver fails on a sizeable subset of the tested (both easy and hard) instances. The SPEX Left LU package is written in ANSI C, comes with a MATLAB interface, and is distributed via GitHub, as a component of the SPEX software package, and as a component of SuiteSparse. 

To meet the growing need for extended or exact precision solvers, an efficient framework based on Integer-Preserving Gaussian Elimination (IPGE) has been recently developed, which includes dense/sparse LU/Cholesky factorizations and dense LU/Cholesky factorization updates for column and/or row replacement. This paper discusses our ongoing work developing the sparse LU/Cholesky column/row-replacement update and the sparse rank-l update/downdate. We first present some basic background for the exact factorization framework based on IPGE. Then we give our proposed algorithms along with some implementation and data-structure details. Finally, we provide some experimental results showcasing the performance of our update algorithms. Specifically, we show that updating these exact factorizations can typically be 10x to 100x faster than (re-)factorizing the matrices from scratch.