The rate of convergence of Toeplitz based PCG methods for second order nonlinear boundary value problems

Summary. In previous works 21–23] we proposed the use of 5] and band Toeplitz based preconditioners for the solution of 1D and 2D boundary value problems (BVP) by means of the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) methods. As and band Toeplitz linear systems can be solved 4] by using fast sine transforms 8], these methods become especially attractive in a parallel environment of computation. In this paper we extend this technique to the nonlinear, nonsymmetric case and, in addition, we prove some clustering properties for the spectra of the preconditioned matrices showing why these methods exhibit a convergence speed which results to be more than linear. Therefore these methods work much finer than those based on separable preconditioners 18,45], on incomplete LU factorizations 36,13,27], and on circulant preconditioners 9,30,35] since the latter two techniques do not assure a linear rate of convergence. On the other hand, the proposed technique has a wider range of application since it can be naturally used for nonlinear, nonsymmetric problems and for BVP in which the coefficients of the differential operator are not strictly positive and only piecewise smooth. Finally the several numerical experiments performed here and in 22,23] confirm the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis. Received December 19, 1995 / Revised version received September 15, 1997