English

Minimizing the Arithmetic and Communication Complexity of Jacobi's Method for Eigenvalues and Singular Values: Part One -- Serial Algorithms

Numerical Analysis 2026-04-21 v2 Computational Complexity Numerical Analysis

Abstract

We analyze several versions of Jacobi's method for the symmetric eigenvalue problem. Our goal is to reduce the asymptotic cost of the algorithm as much as possible, as measured by the number of arithmetic operations performed and associated (serial or parallel) communication, i.e., the amount of data moved between slow and fast memory or between processors in a network. The first half of this effort, which considers the serial setting, is presented here; this paper contains rigorous complexity bounds for a variety of serial Jacobi algorithms, built on both classic O(n3)O(n^3) matrix multiplication and fast, Strassen-like O(nω0)O(n^{\omega_0}) alternatives. In the classical case, we show that a blocked implementation of Jacobi's method attains the communication lower bound for O(n3)O(n^3) matrix multiplication (and is therefore expected to be communication optimal among O(n3)O(n^3) eigensolvers). In the fast setting, we demonstrate that a recursive version of blocked Jacobi can go further, reaching essentially optimal complexity in both measures. We also derive analogous complexity bounds for (one-sided) Jacobi SVD algorithms. A forthcoming sequel to this paper will extend our complexity analysis to the parallel case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.03466,
  title  = {Minimizing the Arithmetic and Communication Complexity of Jacobi's Method for Eigenvalues and Singular Values: Part One -- Serial Algorithms},
  author = {James Demmel and Hengrui Luo and Ryan Schneider and Yifu Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.03466},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

26 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:58:07.917Z