On block diagonal and block triangular iterative schemes and preconditioners for stabilized saddle point problems

We review the use of block diagonal and block lower/upper triangular splittings for constructing iterative methods and preconditioners for solving stabilized saddle point problems. We introduce new variants of these splittings and obtain new results on the convergence of the associated stationary iterations and new bounds on the eigenvalues of the corresponding preconditioned matrices. We further consider inexact versions as preconditioners for flexible Krylov subspace methods, and show experimentally that our techniques can be highly effective for solving linear systems of saddle point type arising from stabilized finite element discretizations of two model problems, one from incompressible fluid mechanics and the other from magnetostatics

Parallel symmetric eigenvalue problem solvers

Sparse symmetric eigenvalue problems arise in many computational science and engineering applications: in structural mechanics, nanoelectronics, and spectral reordering, for example. Often, the large size of these problems requires the development of eigensolvers that scale well on parallel computing platforms. In this dissertation, we describe two such eigensolvers, TraceMin and TraceMin-Davidson. These methods are different from many other eigensolvers in that they do not require accurate linear solves to be performed at each iteration in order to find the smallest eigenvalues and their associated eigenvectors. After introducing these closely related eigensolvers, we discuss alternative methods for solving the saddle point problems arising at each iteration, which can improve the overall running time. Additionally, we present TraceMin-Multisectioning, a new TraceMin implementation geared towards finding large numbers of eigenpairs in any given interval of the spectrum. We conclude with numerical experiments comparing our trace-minimization solvers to other popular eigensolvers (such as Krylov-Schur, LOBPCG, Jacobi-Davidson, and FEAST), establishing the competitiveness of our methods