A study on block flexible iterative solvers with applications to Earth imaging problem in geophysics

This work is concerned with the development and study of a minimum residual norm subspace method based on the Generalized Conjugate Residual method with inner Orthogonalization (GCRO) method that allows flexible preconditioning and deflated restarting for the solution of non-symmetric or non-Hermitian linear systems. First we recall the main features of Flexible Generalized Minimum Residual with deflated restarting (FGMRES-DR), a recently proposed algorithm of the same family but based on the GMRES method. Next we introduce the new inner-outer subspace method named FGCRO-DR. A theoretical comparison of both algorithms is then made in the case of flexible preconditioning. It is proved that FGCRO-DR and FGMRES-DR are algebraically equivalent if a collinearity condition is satisfied. While being nearly as expensive as FGMRES-DR in terms of computational operations per cycle, FGCRO-DR offers the additional advantage to be suitable for the solution of sequences of slowly changing linear systems (where both the matrix and right-hand side can change) through subspace recycling. Numerical experiments on the solution of multidimensional elliptic partial differential equations show the efficiency of FGCRO-DR when solving sequences of linear systems.