An implicit preconditioning strategy for large-scale generalized Sylvester equations

Large-scale generalized Sylvester equations appear in several important applications. Although the involved operator is linear, solving them requires specialized techniques. Different numerical methods have been designed to solve them, including direct factorization methods suitable for small size problems, and Krylov-type iterative methods for large-scale problems. For these iterative schemes, preconditioning is always a difficult task that deserves to be addressed. We present and analyze an implicit preconditioning strategy specially designed for solving generalized Sylvester equations that uses a preconditioned residual direction at every iteration. The advantage is that the preconditioned direction is built implicitly, avoiding the explicit knowledge of the given matrices. Only the effect of the matrix–vector product with the given matrices is required. We present encouraging numerical experiments for a set of different problems coming from several applications.