Acceleration of Randomized Kaczmarz Method via the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma

The Kaczmarz method is an algorithm for finding the solution to an overdetermined consistent system of linear equations Ax=b by iteratively projecting onto the solution spaces. The randomized version put forth by Strohmer and Vershynin yields provably exponential convergence in expectation, which for highly overdetermined systems even outperforms the conjugate gradient method. In this article we present a modified version of the randomized Kaczmarz method which at each iteration selects the optimal projection from a randomly chosen set, which in most cases significantly improves the convergence rate. We utilize a Johnson-Lindenstrauss dimension reduction technique to keep the runtime on the same order as the original randomized version, adding only extra preprocessing time. We present a series of empirical studies which demonstrate the remarkable acceleration in convergence to the solution using this modified approach

Preconditioning complex symmetric linear systems

A new polynomial preconditioner for symmetric complex linear systems based on Hermitian and skew-Hermitian splitting (HSS) for complex symmetric linear systems is herein presented. It applies to Conjugate Orthogonal Conjugate Gradient (COCG) or Conjugate Orthogonal Conjugate Residual (COCR) iterative solvers and does not require any estimation of the spectrum of the coefficient matrix. An upper bound of the condition number of the preconditioned linear system is provided. Moreover, to reduce the computational cost, an inexact variant based on incomplete Cholesky decomposition or orthogonal polynomials is proposed. Numerical results show that the present preconditioner and its inexact variant are efficient and robust solvers for this class of linear systems. A stability analysis of the method completes the description of the preconditioner.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures, 4 table

Numerically Stable Recurrence Relations for the Communication Hiding Pipelined Conjugate Gradient Method

Pipelined Krylov subspace methods (also referred to as communication-hiding methods) have been proposed in the literature as a scalable alternative to classic Krylov subspace algorithms for iteratively computing the solution to a large linear system in parallel. For symmetric and positive definite system matrices the pipelined Conjugate Gradient method outperforms its classic Conjugate Gradient counterpart on large scale distributed memory hardware by overlapping global communication with essential computations like the matrix-vector product, thus hiding global communication. A well-known drawback of the pipelining technique is the (possibly significant) loss of numerical stability. In this work a numerically stable variant of the pipelined Conjugate Gradient algorithm is presented that avoids the propagation of local rounding errors in the finite precision recurrence relations that construct the Krylov subspace basis. The multi-term recurrence relation for the basis vector is replaced by two-term recurrences, improving stability without increasing the overall computational cost of the algorithm. The proposed modification ensures that the pipelined Conjugate Gradient method is able to attain a highly accurate solution independently of the pipeline length. Numerical experiments demonstrate a combination of excellent parallel performance and improved maximal attainable accuracy for the new pipelined Conjugate Gradient algorithm. This work thus resolves one of the major practical restrictions for the useability of pipelined Krylov subspace methods.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, 2 algorithm