Preconditioned Barzilai-Borwein method for the numerical solution of partial differential equations

The preconditioned Barzilai-Borwein method is derived and applied to the numerical solution of large, sparse, symmetric and positive definite linear systems that arise in the discretization of partial differential equations. A set of well-known preconditioning techniques are combined with this new method to take advantage of the special features of the Barzilai-Borwein method. Numerical results on some elliptic test problems are presented. These results indicate that the preconditioned Barzilai-Borwein method is competitive and sometimes preferable to the preconditioned conjugate gradient method.