SLEPc : A scalable and flexible toolkit for the solution of eigenvalue problems

The Scalable Library for Eigenvalue Problem Computations (SLEPc) is a software library for computing a few eigenvalues and associated eigenvectors of a large sparse matrix or matrix pencil. It has been developed on top of PETSc and enforces the same programming paradigm.The emphasis of the software is on methods and techniques appropriate for problems in which the associated matrices are sparse, for example, those arising after the discretization of partial differential equations. Therefore, most of the methods offered by the library are projection methods such as Arnoldi or Lanczos, or other methods with similar properties. SLEPc provides basic methods as well as more sophisticated algorithms. It also provides built-in support for spectral transformations such as the shift-and-invert technique. SLEPc is a general library in the sense that it covers standard and generalized eigenvalue problems, both Hermitian and non-Hermitian, with either real or complex arithmetic.SLEPc can be easily applied to real world problems. To illustrate this, several case studies arising from real applications are presented and solved with SLEPc with little programming effort. The addressed problems include a matrix-free standard problem, a complex generalized problem, and a singular value decomposition. The implemented codes exhibit good properties regarding flexibility as well as parallel performance.