Using spectral low rank preconditioners for large electromagnetic calculations

For solving large dense complex linear systems that arise in electromagnetic calculations, we perform experiments using a general purpose spectral low rank update preconditioner in the context of the GMRES method preconditioned by an approximate inverse preconditioner. The goal of the spectral preconditioner is to improve the convergence properties by shifting by one the smallest eigenvalues of the original preconditioned system. Numerical experiments on parallel distributed memory computers are presented to illustrate the efficiency of this technique on large and challenging real-life industrial problems. Copyright 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.