Robust parallel eigenvector computation for the non-symmetric eigenvalue problem

Abstract

A standard approach for computing eigenvectors of a non-symmetric matrix reduced to real Schur form relies on a variant of backward substitution. Backward substitution is prone to overflow. To avoid overflow, the LAPACK eigenvector routine DTREVC3 associates every eigenvector with a scaling factor and dynamically rescales an entire eigenvector during the backward substitution such that overflow cannot occur. When many eigenvectors are computed, DTREVC3 applies backward substitution successively for every eigenvector. This corresponds to level-2 BLAS operations and constitutes a bottleneck. This paper redesigns the backward substitution such that the entire computation is cast as tile operations (level-3 BLAS). By replacing LAPACK’s scaling factor with tile-local scaling factors, our solver decouples the tiles and sustains parallel scalability even when a lot of numerical scaling is necessary.