Relaxed and stabilized incomplete factorizations for non-self-adjoint linear systems

Two classes of incomplete factorization preconditioners are considered for nonsymmetric linear systems arising from second order finite difference discretizations of non-self-adjoint elliptic partial differential equations. Analytic and experimental results show that relaxed incomplete factorization methods exhibit numerical instabilities of the type observed with other incomplete factorizations, and the effects of instability are characterized in terms of the relaxation parameter. Several stabilized incomplete factorizations are introduced that are designed to avoid numerically unstable computations. In experiments with two-dimensional problems with variable coefficients and on nonuniform meshes, the stabilized methods are shown to be much more robust than standard incomplete factorizations.The work presented in this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants DMS-8607478, CCR-8818340, and ASC-8958544, and by the U.S. Army Research Office under grant DAAL-0389-K-0016.