Title:   Towards effective methods for computing matrix pseudospectra

Speaker:   E. Gallopoulos ( email )

Affiliation:   Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics , University of Patras 26500 Patras, Greece

Note:   This talk presents results obtained in joint reseach with  C. BekasE. Kokiopoulou, I. Koutis, A. Sidiropoulos and V. Simoncini.

Abstract   The e- pseudospectrum of a matrix, defined for example as

Le (A) = {z: z Î L(A+E) for some   E Î Cn x n with || E || £ e}
where L(A) denotes the spectrum of A, is acknowledged to be a powerful mechanism for investigating the behavior of several (nonnormal) matrix-dependent algorithms, ranging from iterative methods for large linear systems to time-stepping algorithms; note the inclusion of specific functions to that effect in the Test Matrix Toolbox of MATLAB as well as the Oxford URL http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/projects/pseudospectra. The standard workhorse method for computing pseudospectra is the following: i) Discretize the region of interest in the complex plane and ii) compute the minimum singular value of the matrix zI-A at every gridpoint z. This algorithm is simple, robust, embarassingly parallel but extremely expensive even for medium sized matrices: Much more expensive than having to compute matrix characteristics, such as eigenvalues, singular values and condition numbers. In other words, pseudospectra are powerful but we must find ways for obtaining them at lesser cost. ``Domain based'' methods for computing pseudospectra attempt to reduce the number of gridpoints while ``matrix based'' methods attempt to obtain the singular values faster. In this talk we introduce the concept of pseudospectra and present recent work designed to alleviate this computational bottleneck in order to let the pseudospectrum become a practical tool for engineers and scientists. We describe algorithms that have drastically improved performance while maintaining a high degree of large grain parallelism. We also consider the effectiveness of these methods in the context of parallel architectures as well as a MATLAB-based environment for parallel programming using MPI on small, off-the-shelf parallel systems. 

About the speaker   Stratis Gallopoulos (Ph.D. Illinois, B.Sc. Imperial College, London) is Professor of Computer Engineering and Informatics at the University of Patras. Prior to that he held positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California Santa Barbara and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He participated in the development and practical application of the Cedar multiprocessor at the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development (1987-94) and of the first Massively Parallel Processor built by Goodyear for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (1980-85). His research interests include numerical algorithms and environments for large-scale scientific computation, parallel processing and Computational Science & Engineering education. Professor Gallopoulos served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Computing in Science & Engineering Magazine, he was  Program Committee Chair of the 2001 ACM  International Conference on Supercomputing, he is member of the Steering Committee of that same conference as well as of the European Research Conference on Advanced Environments for High Performance Computing and is editor of the International Journal of High-Speed Computing. He is also member of program committees for several other conferences, most recently ICPP'02, HERCMA'01 and  ISHPC-IV.


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