MATLAB: Are iterative methods always better than direct methods for solving large linear systems

Question

I am trying to solve a very sparse linear system Ax = b. A is very sparse – if A is of size N^2 x N^2, all nontrivial elements for any row k are located in between (k-2N, k+2N). The overall the number of nontrivial elements in A is bounded by 13*N^2 (for a matrix with N^4 elements)

Now back to the original question: Currently I am using mldivide to solve the system. On a 1e6 x 1e6 matrix, the program takes around 60-75s 64 bit machine. Now it is possible to beat this performance using iterative methods? The ones I have tried (built into MATLAB) do not seem to offer any advantages; however, I think that may be due to the fact that I am not using a preconditioner. The problem is, how do I effectively get a preconditioner? I tried using ilu, but that is also pretty slow (and there is no guarantee that it will do the trick).

Thanks, Peter

Answer 1

From my personal experience, there is only one case where I have been able to outperform mldivide through the use of one of the Matlab-provided iterative solvers. In this particular application I had to solve many linear systems (several hundredth, size > 1e5 unknowns), all the systems were different (left and right hand side) but each system to solve was very close to the previous one. I could therefore provide a very good initial guess for the solution. There PCG with incomplete factorization provided some speed improvement as only a few iterations were needed.

The problem is that mldivide is so efficient that unless you have memory issues (or if you have a very good estimate of your solution), the provided iterative solvers are no match.

Hope this helps

A.