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An Approach to Making SPAI and PSAI Preconditioning Effective for Large Irregular Sparse Linear Systems

We investigate the SPAI and PSAI preconditioning procedures and shed light on two important features of them: (i) For the large linear system $Ax=b$ with $A$ irregular sparse, i.e., with $A$ having $s$ relatively dense columns, SPAI may be very costly to implement, and the resulting sparse approximate inverses may be ineffective for preconditioning. PSAI can be effective for preconditioning but may require excessive storage and be unacceptably time consuming; (ii) the situation is improved drastically when $A$ is regular sparse, that is, all of its columns are sparse. In this case, both SPAI and PSAI are efficient. Moreover, SPAI and, especially, PSAI are more likely to construct effective preconditioners. Motivated by these features, we propose an approach to making SPAI and PSAI more practical for $Ax=b$ with $A$ irregular sparse. We first split $A$ into a regular sparse $\tilde A$ and a matrix of low rank $s$. Then exploiting the Sherman--Morrison--Woodbury formula, we transform $Ax=b$ into $s+1$ new linear systems with the same coefficient matrix $\tilde A$, use SPAI and PSAI to compute sparse approximate inverses of $\tilde A$ efficiently and apply Krylov iterative methods to solve the preconditioned linear systems. Theoretically, we consider the non-singularity and conditioning of $\tilde A$ obtained from some important classes of matrices. We show how to recover an approximate solution of $Ax=b$ from those of the $s+1$ new systems and how to design reliable stopping criteria for the $s+1$ systems to guarantee that the approximate solution of $Ax=b$ satisfies a desired accuracy. Given the fact that irregular sparse linear systems are common in applications, this approach widely extends the practicability of SPAI and PSAI. Numerical results demonstrate the considerable superiority of our approach to the direct application of SPAI and PSAI to $Ax=b$.