Summary This paper presents a class of limited memory preconditioners (LMP) for solving linear systems of equations with symmetric indefinite matrices and multiple right‐hand sides. These preconditioners based on limited memory quasi‐Newton formulas require a small number k of linearly independent vectors and may be used to improve an existing first‐level preconditioner. The contributions of the paper are threefold. First, we derive a formula to characterize the spectrum of the preconditioned operator. A spectral analysis of the preconditioned matrix shows that the eigenvalues are all real and that the LMP class is able to cluster at least k eigenvalues at 1. Secondly, we show that the eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrix enjoy interlacing properties with respect to the eigenvalues of the original matrix provided that the k linearly independent vectors have been prior projected onto the invariant subspaces associated with the eigenvalues of the original matrix in the open right and left half‐plane, respectively. Third, we focus on theoretical properties of the Ritz‐LMP variant, where Ritz information is used to determine the k vectors. Finally, we illustrate the numerical behaviour of the Ritz limited memory preconditioners on realistic applications in structural mechanics that require the solution of sequences of large‐scale symmetric saddle‐point systems. Numerical experiments show the relevance of the proposed preconditioner leading to a significant decrease in terms of computational operations when solving such sequences of linear systems. A saving of up to 43% in terms of computational effort is obtained on one of these applications. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Many applications in structural mechanics require the numerical solution of sequences of linear systems typically issued from a finite element discretization of the governing equations on fine meshes. The method of Lagrange multipliers is often used to take into account mechanical constraints. The resulting matrices then exhibit a saddle point structure and the iterative solution of such preconditioned linear systems is considered as challenging. A popular strategy is then to combine preconditioning and deflation to yield an efficient method. We propose an alternative that is applicable to the general case and not only to matrices with a saddle point structure. In this approach, we consider to update an existing algebraic or application-based preconditioner, using specific available information exploiting the knowledge of an approximate invariant subspace or of matrix-vector products. The resulting preconditioner has the form of a limited memory quasi-Newton matrix and requires a small number of linearly independent vectors. Numerical experiments performed on three large-scale applications in elasticity highlight the relevance of the new approach. We show that the proposed method outperforms the deflation method when considering sequences of linear systems with varying matrices.