The Bethe-Salpeter eigenvalue problem is a dense structured eigenvalue
problem arising from discretized Bethe-Salpeter equation in the context of
computing exciton energies and states. A computational challenge is that at
least half of the eigenvalues and the associated eigenvectors are desired in
practice. We establish the equivalence between Bethe-Salpeter eigenvalue
problems and real Hamiltonian eigenvalue problems. Based on theoretical
analysis, structure preserving algorithms for a class of Bethe-Salpeter
eigenvalue problems are proposed. We also show that for this class of problems
all eigenvalues obtained from the Tamm-Dancoff approximation are overestimated.
In order to solve large scale problems of practical interest, we discuss
parallel implementations of our algorithms targeting distributed memory
systems. Several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the efficiency
and accuracy of our algorithms
