A Bramble-Pasciak-like method with applications in optimization

Saddle-point systems arise in many applications areas, in fact in any situation where an extremum principle arises with constraints. The Stokes problem describing slow viscous flow of an incompressible fluid is a classic example coming from partial differential equations and in the area of Optimization such problems are ubiquitous.\ud In this manuscript we show how new approaches for the solution of saddle-point systems arising in Optimization can be derived from the Bramble-Pasciak Conjugate Gradient approach widely used in PDEs and more recent generalizations thereof. In particular we derive a class of new solution methods based on the use of Preconditioned Conjugate Gradients in non-standard inner products and demonstrate how these can be understood through more standard machinery. We show connections to Constraint Preconditioning and give the results of numerical computations on a number of standard Optimization test examples

Preconditioning of linear least squares by robust incomplete factorization for implicitly held normal equations

The efficient solution of the normal equations corresponding to a large sparse linear least squares problem can be extremely challenging. Robust incomplete factorization (RIF) preconditioners represent one approach that has the important feature of computing an incomplete LLT factorization of the normal equations matrix without having to form the normal matrix itself. The right-looking implementation of Benzi and T˚uma has been used in a number of studies but experience as shown that in some cases it can be computationally slow and its memory requirements are not known a priori. Here a new left-looking variant is presented that employs a symbolic preprocessing step to replace the potentially expensive searching through entries of the normal matrix. This involves a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that is computed as the computation proceeds. An inexpensive but effective pruning algorithm is proposed to limit the number of edges in the DAG. Problems arising from practical applications are used to compare the performance of the right-looking approach with a left-looking implementation that computes the normal matrix explicitly and our new implicit DAG-based left-looking variant

Evaluating the Impact of SDC on the GMRES Iterative Solver

Increasing parallelism and transistor density, along with increasingly tighter energy and peak power constraints, may force exposure of occasionally incorrect computation or storage to application codes. Silent data corruption (SDC) will likely be infrequent, yet one SDC suffices to make numerical algorithms like iterative linear solvers cease progress towards the correct answer. Thus, we focus on resilience of the iterative linear solver GMRES to a single transient SDC. We derive inexpensive checks to detect the effects of an SDC in GMRES that work for a more general SDC model than presuming a bit flip. Our experiments show that when GMRES is used as the inner solver of an inner-outer iteration, it can "run through" SDC of almost any magnitude in the computationally intensive orthogonalization phase. That is, it gets the right answer using faulty data without any required roll back. Those SDCs which it cannot run through, get caught by our detection scheme