Special Issue: 2008 Copper Mountain Conference

Abstract

The biennial Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods was held April 6–11, 2008. This most recent meeting included both theoretical and applied presentations spanning a broad range of iterative/linear algebra topics such as saddle-point systems, eigensolvers, nonlinear solvers, inverse problems, and block solution methods. The diverse impact of iterative method research can be gauged by the broad range of application areas represented at the meeting. Some of these include computational fluid/gas flow, large-scale optimization, stochastic finite elements, porous media, image processing, magnetohydrodynamics, fluid-structure interaction, Markov processes, solar cells, and blood flow. Howard Elman (University of Maryland) and Panayot Vassilevski (Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) served as co-chairs. Management services were provided by Annette Anthony of Front Range Scientific Computations, Inc. The conference gratefully acknowledges support from Boeing, the Department of Energy, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation. The Copper Mountain Conference is organized in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Submissions to this special issue were open to the public. This was advertised in advance on web sites of both the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing (SISC) and the Copper Mountain Conference. The papers in this issue reflect leading-edge research in iterative methods. Many topics are covered including incomplete factorizations, convergence analysis, and multiple right hand side linear systems. Contributions also appear in areas such as optimization, inverse problems, signal restoration, and stochastic partital differential equations representing a broadening interest within these communities in iterative solvers. Additionally, this issue contains a healthy collection of papers in newer iterative solver topics associated with self-adapting methods, Markov chains, clustering, pagerank, magnetohydrodynamics, interface tracking, and quantum chromodynamics. Some of these submissions also appeared in the student paper competition, a unique event at the Copper Mountain conferences that has proven to be a very successful forum for presenting the latest results in the field. We have had increasingly strong participation from very talented recent Ph.D. holders and current Ph.D. students in this competition. This special issue clearly demonstrates the strong impact of iterative methods in various areas of applications and the need for continued research. I would like to thank the guest editorial board, the SISC editorial board, and the anonymous referees for their hard work to help meet the strict deadlines. I would also like to acknowledge the SIAM staff for their efforts. Special appreciation is due to Mitch Chernoff (SIAM Publications Manager) and Colleen Hills (SIAM Editorial Assistant) for their work on this special issue. We hope that this special issue will stimulate further progress in this exciting area of research.