This project aims to develop new algorithms that will help enable large-scale eigenvalue-related modeling and simulations in many scientific and engineering areas, including linear stability analysis of dynamical systems, mechanics of materials, optimization of acoustic emissions, study of superconductivity, vibrations under conditions of uncertainty, and many more. Certain methods are also of significance to other areas; for example, a fast exponential matrix-vector product is essential to the exponential integrator for solving stiff time-dependent differential equations that are difficult to tackle by traditional methods. New textbook writing and graduate student mentoring will help cultivate qualified researchers and industrial professionals to generate further impact in future.
Eigenvalues and closely related mathematical tools (e.g., pseudospectra) are fundamentally descriptive in many areas of applied mathematics and scientific computing. This project concerns systematic development and analysis of innovative preconditioned solvers for several important classes of large-scale and complex eigenvalue-related problems. For large linear symmetric eigenproblems, variants of preconditioned eigensolvers have been thoroughly investigated and widely used with great success in many applications. The plan is to show that the preconditioning and the solver framework can both be generalized significantly and integrated with great flexibility to solve a much broader class of challenging eigenvalue-related problems. The methods to be developed will be reliable, efficient and flexible. The specific research topics include (i) preconditioning (spectral filtering) with matrix functions, (ii) solving nonlinear eigenproblems, and (iii) computing spectra and pseudospectra of large structured matrices.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
