CS 290H, Fall 2005: Final Project Ideas

These are just ideas -- please see me if there's something else you'd like to work on, or if you'd like to discuss any of these. Let me know by Wednesday 9 November what your project will be.

Your project can be either a survey or an application experiment. A survey project includes a 20-minute presentation during the last week of class, 28 or 31 November. No presentation is required for an application experiment, but I'd like to arrange to see a demo of your work in the lab before the end of the quarter. For either a survey or an application project, you must turn in a written final report of 5-10 pages by Wednesday 7 December.

Survey projects. For a survey project, you will read a paper or two on a sparse matrix topic not covered in class. Here are some possibilites. Each possibility comes with a link to one paper; in most cases you'll end up reading one or two related papers for background as well. These are just suggestions -- you are welcome to talk to me if you prefer to present a different topic or different papers.

• Ordering methods for preconditioned conjugate gradient methods applied to unstructured grid problems. (paper: D'Azevedo, Forsyth, and Tang)
• Ordering, anisotropy, and factored sparse approximate inverses. (paper: Bridson and Tang)
• Algorithms for finding weighted bipartite matchings. (paper: Duff and Koster)
• Preconditioning symmetric indefinite systems using weighted matching in graphs. (paper: Hagemann and Schenk)
• Maximum-weight basis preconditioners. (paper: Boman, Chen, Hendrickson, and Toledo)
• Nearly-linear time algorithms for solving linear systems using support-theory preconditioning. (paper: Spielman and Teng)
• Solving elliptic finite element systems in near-linear time with support preconditioners. (paper: Boman, Hendrickson, and Vavasis)
• Preconditioning symmetric indefinite systems from optimization problems. (paper: Haws and Meyer)
• Preconditioning dense linear systems from electromagnetics problems. (paper: Duff, Giraud, Langou, and Martin)
• You can also present a paper from the Preconditioning 2005 conference. There is no online proceedings, but you can find many of the papers that go with the talks on the authors' web pages.

Application experiments. An application experiment is any problem that comes from computational science and has a large linear system in it; you will experiment with preconditioned iterative methods for the sparse computation. The application should be one you are already familiar with, from your research or another class or a collaboration. Talk to me if you'd like to do this.