We survey general techniques and open problems in numerical linear algebra on parallel architectures. We first discuss basic principles of parallel processing, describing the costs of basic operations on parallel machines, including general principles for constructing efficient algorithms. We illustrate these principles using current architectures and software systems, and by showing how one would implement matrix multiplication. Then, we present direct and iterative algorithms for solving linear systems of equations, linear least squares problems, the symmetric eigenvalue problem, the nonsymmetric eigenvalue problem, the singular value decomposition, and generalizations of these to two matrices. We consider dense, band and sparse matrices.

The dense nonsymmetric eigenproblem is one of the hardest linear algebra problems to solve effectively on massively parallel machines. Rather than trying to design a "black box" eigenroutine in the spirit of EISPACK or LAPACK, we propose building a toolbox for this problem. The tools are meant to be used in different combinations on different problems and architectures. In this paper, we will describe these tools which include basic block matrix computations, the matrix sign function, 2-dimensional bisection, and spectral divide and conquer using the matrix sign function to find selected eigenvalues. We also outline how we deal with ill-conditioning and potential instability. Numerical examples are included. A future paper will discuss error analysis in detail and extensions to the generalized eigenproblem.

We discuss two inverse free, highly parallel, spectral divide and conquer algorithms: one for computing an invariant subspace of a nonsymmetric matrix and another one for computing left and right de ating subspaces of a regular matrix pencil A, B. These two closely related algorithms are based on earlier ones of Bulgakov, Godunov and Malyshev, but improve on them in several ways. These algorithms only use easily parallelizable linear algebra building blocks: matrix multiplication and QR decomposition. The existing parallel algorithms for the nonsymmetric eigenproblem use the matrix sign function, which is faster but can be less stable than the new algorithm. Appears also as

Abstract. The implementation and performance of a class of divide-and-conquer algorithms for computing the spectral decomposition of nonsymmetric matrices on distributed memory parallel computers are studied in this paper. After presenting a general framework, we focus on a spectral divide-and-conquer (SDC) algorithm with Newton iteration. Although the algorithm requires several times as many floating point operations as the best serial QR algorithm, it can be simply constructed from a small set of highly parallelizable matrix building blocks within Level 3 basic linear algebra subroutines (BLAS). Efficient implementations of these building blocks are available on a wide range of machines. In some ill-conditioned cases, the algorithm may lose numerical stability, but this can easily be detected and compensated for. The algorithm reached 31 % efficiency with respect to the underlying PUMMA matrix multiplication and 82 % efficiency with respect to the underlying ScaLAPACK matrix inversion on a 256 processor Intel Touchstone Delta system, and 41 % efficiency with respect to the matrix multiplication in CMSSL on a 32 node Thinking Machines CM-5 with vector units. Our performance model predicts the performance reasonably accurately. To take advantage of the geometric nature of SDC algorithms, we have designed a graphical user interface to let the user choose the spectral decomposition according to specified regions in the complex plane.