The Poisson-Boltzmann equation (PBE) is a nonlinear elliptic PDE that arises in biomolecular modeling and is a fundamental tool for structural biology. It is used to calculate electrostatic potentials around an ensemble of fixed charges immersed in an ionic solution. Efficient numerical computation of the PBE yields a high number of degrees of freedom in the resultant algebraic system of equations. Coupled with the fact that in most cases the PBE requires to be solved multiple times for a large number of system configurations, this poses great computational challenges to conventional numerical techniques. To accelerate such computations, we here present the reduced basis method (RBM) which greatly reduces this computational complexity by constructing a reduced order model of typically low dimension. In this study, we employ a simple version of the PBE for proof of concept and discretize the linearized PBE (LPBE) with a centered finite difference scheme. The resultant linear system is s 查看全文>>