We compare two approaches to compute a fraction of the spectrum of dense symmetric
definite generalized eigenproblems: one is based on the reduction to tridiagonal form, and
the other on the Krylov-subspace iteration. Two large-scale applications, arising in
molecular dynamics and material science, are employed to investigate the contributions of
the application, architecture, and parallelism of the method to the performance of the solvers.
The experimental results on a state-of-the-art 8-core platform, equipped with a graphics …