Some Preconditioning Techniques for Saddle Point Problems

Saddle point problems arise frequently in many applications in science and engineering, including constrained optimization, mixed finite element formulations of partial differential equations, circuit analysis, and so forth. Indeed the formulation of most problems with constraints gives rise to saddle point systems. This paper provides a concise overview of iterative approaches for the solution of such systems which are of particular importance in the context of large scale computation. In particular we describe some of the most useful preconditioning techniques for Krylov subspace solvers applied to saddle point problems, including block and constrained preconditioners.\ud \ud The work of Michele Benzi was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant DMS-0511336

GMRES-Accelerated ADMM for Quadratic Objectives

We consider the sequence acceleration problem for the alternating direction method-of-multipliers (ADMM) applied to a class of equality-constrained problems with strongly convex quadratic objectives, which frequently arise as the Newton subproblem of interior-point methods. Within this context, the ADMM update equations are linear, the iterates are confined within a Krylov subspace, and the General Minimum RESidual (GMRES) algorithm is optimal in its ability to accelerate convergence. The basic ADMM method solves a $\kappa$-conditioned problem in $O(\sqrt{\kappa})$ iterations. We give theoretical justification and numerical evidence that the GMRES-accelerated variant consistently solves the same problem in $O(\kappa^{1/4})$ iterations for an order-of-magnitude reduction in iterations, despite a worst-case bound of $O(\sqrt{\kappa})$ iterations. The method is shown to be competitive against standard preconditioned Krylov subspace methods for saddle-point problems. The method is embedded within SeDuMi, a popular open-source solver for conic optimization written in MATLAB, and used to solve many large-scale semidefinite programs with error that decreases like $O(1/k^{2})$, instead of $O(1/k)$, where $k$ is the iteration index.Comment: 31 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in SIAM Journal on Optimization (SIOPT

Incomplete Augmented Lagrangian Preconditioner for Steady Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations

An incomplete augmented Lagrangian preconditioner, for the steady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations discretized by stable finite elements, is proposed. The eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrix are analyzed. Numerical experiments show that the incomplete augmented Lagrangian-based preconditioner proposed is very robust and performs quite well by the Picard linearization or the Newton linearization over a wide range of values of the viscosity on both uniform and stretched grids