The Influence of the Cluster Point on Rounding Errors and Sensitivity in the Spectral Limited-Memory Preconditioner

Abstract

The spectral limited-memory preconditioner (sLMP) clusters leading eigenvalues of symmetric positive definite matrices to accelerate conjugate gradient (CG) convergence. In practice, the cluster point is often chosen to be unity. In some cases, however, this choice can fail to accelerate convergence relative to unpreconditioned CG, even when highly accurate spectral information is available. Alternative cluster points have been proposed based on exact-arithmetic convergence analysis, but such analysis does not explain this finite-precision behaviour. We study how the cluster point influences two sources of numerical error in sLMP-preconditioned CG. First, we analyse the propagation of floating-point rounding errors during application of the preconditioner and derive computable relative-error bounds. For the dominant subspace (spanned by the eigenvectors associated with the leading eigenvalues of the unpreconditioned system) and its orthogonal complement (spanned by the remaining eigenvectors), these bounds are minimized by a weighted median and a weighted arithmetic mean of the leading eigenvalues, respectively. Our analysis explains why small cluster points can strongly amplify errors in the dominant subspace. Second, we investigate sensitivity to perturbations in the dominant spectral information when constructing the preconditioner. The resulting perturbation bound is minimized by a weighted median of the perturbed dominant eigenvalues, with weights determined by the eigenvector perturbation magnitudes. Numerical experiments on synthetic problems illustrate the predicted rounding-error and sensitivity behaviour. Together, these results show that cluster-point selection in finite precision should account for exact-arithmetic convergence, rounding errors, and inaccuracies in the available spectral information.