Strang-type preconditioners for systems of LMF-based ODE codes

We consider the solution of ordinary differential equations(ODEs) using boundary value methods. These methods require thesolution of one or more unsymmetric, large and sparse linearsystems. The GMRES method with the Strang-type block-circulantpreconditioner is proposed for solving these linear systems.We show that if an A_k1,k2 -stable boundary value method is usedfor an m-by-m system of ODEs, then our preconditioners are invertibleand all the eigenvalues of the preconditioned systems are 1except for at most 2m(k₁ + k₂) outliers. It follows that whenthe GMRES method is applied to solving the preconditioned systems,the method will converge in at most 2m(k₁ + k₂) + 1 iterations.Numerical results are given to illustrate the effectivenessof our methods. Received 8 October 1999. Accepted 30 May 2000.