precondition-total
At its defaults it draws what a hierarchical preconditioner costs, against how accurate it is, at κ = 2.09e+1. The iteration is conjugate gradients on the true matrix and the preconditioner is a solve with the representation, so what is measured is how much of the compression the outer loop repairs and what the repair costs. The count falls monotonically — 13, 8, 6, 3, 2, 2 steps against 41 with no preconditioner — and it keeps falling all the way to the tightest accuracy, which is the number a solver prints and the one everybody watches. The total work, one dense product with A plus one solve with A_H per step, is the other curve, and its minimum is at ε = 0.5 where the preconditioner has rank 1. Past that point every extra digit in the preconditioner is bought and not needed: at the tightest setting the run costs 2.42 times the cheapest, having taken 11 fewer steps to get there.
precondition-total is one function in lib/figures/hsolve.js —
solving with it — the recursion that assembles nothing, and the backward error that was chosen. Everything below came out of it during this build, at
arguments taken from the essays rather than invented for this page. A figure here is the
figure a reader meets in an essay, and if the generator changes, this page changes with it.
At its defaults
Drawn even though every essay passes arguments — which on this site is every essay, at 100% of placements since the standard pass. A default nothing exercises is a trap for the next essay to call this with none, and this is the page where a default that has drifted from the figures around it becomes visible.
The iteration is conjugate gradients on the true matrix and the preconditioner is a solve with the representation, so what is measured is how much of the compression the outer loop repairs and what the repair costs. The count falls monotonically — 13, 8, 6, 3, 2, 2 steps against 41 with no preconditioner — and it keeps falling all the way to the tightest accuracy, which is the number a solver prints and the one everybody watches. The total work, one dense product with A plus one solve with A_H per step, is the other curve, and its minimum is at ε = 0.5 where the preconditioner has rank 1. Past that point every extra digit in the preconditioner is bought and not needed: at the tightest setting the run costs 2.42 times the cheapest, having taken 11 fewer steps to get there.
deltaMult: 4
The arguments are the ones A rank that is a number of digits passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
The iteration is conjugate gradients on the true matrix and the preconditioner is a solve with the representation, so what is measured is how much of the compression the outer loop repairs and what the repair costs. The count falls monotonically — 16, 14, 7, 4, 3, 2 steps against 72 with no preconditioner — and it keeps falling all the way to the tightest accuracy, which is the number a solver prints and the one everybody watches. The total work, one dense product with A plus one solve with A_H per step, is the other curve, and its minimum is at ε = 0.5 where the preconditioner has rank 1. Past that point every extra digit in the preconditioner is bought and not needed: at the tightest setting the run costs 1.59 times the cheapest, having taken 14 fewer steps to get there.
deltaMult: 16
The arguments are the ones An accuracy that is a backward error passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
The iteration is conjugate gradients on the true matrix and the preconditioner is a solve with the representation, so what is measured is how much of the compression the outer loop repairs and what the repair costs. The count falls monotonically — 17, 17, 8, 4, 2, 2 steps against 105 with no preconditioner — and it keeps falling all the way to the tightest accuracy, which is the number a solver prints and the one everybody watches. The total work, one dense product with A plus one solve with A_H per step, is the other curve, and its minimum is at ε = 10⁻⁶ where the preconditioner has rank 6. Past that point every extra digit in the preconditioner is bought and not needed: at the tightest setting the run costs 1.34 times the cheapest, having taken 0 fewer steps to get there.
deltaMult: 1
The arguments are the ones The accuracy worth paying for passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
The iteration is conjugate gradients on the true matrix and the preconditioner is a solve with the representation, so what is measured is how much of the compression the outer loop repairs and what the repair costs. The count falls monotonically — 13, 8, 6, 3, 2, 2 steps against 41 with no preconditioner — and it keeps falling all the way to the tightest accuracy, which is the number a solver prints and the one everybody watches. The total work, one dense product with A plus one solve with A_H per step, is the other curve, and its minimum is at ε = 0.5 where the preconditioner has rank 1. Past that point every extra digit in the preconditioner is bought and not needed: at the tightest setting the run costs 2.42 times the cheapest, having taken 11 fewer steps to get there.
deltaMult: 64
The arguments are the ones The accuracy worth paying for passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
The iteration is conjugate gradients on the true matrix and the preconditioner is a solve with the representation, so what is measured is how much of the compression the outer loop repairs and what the repair costs. The count falls monotonically — 15, 15, 14, 5, 3, 2 steps against 119 with no preconditioner — and it keeps falling all the way to the tightest accuracy, which is the number a solver prints and the one everybody watches. The total work, one dense product with A plus one solve with A_H per step, is the other curve, and its minimum is at ε = 10⁻⁸ where the preconditioner has rank 5. Past that point every extra digit in the preconditioner is bought and not needed: at the tightest setting the run costs 1.00 times the cheapest, having taken 0 fewer steps to get there.
What it checked while drawing
Every figure above asserted its own claims on the way to being drawn, and a claim that failed
would have failed the build rather than drawn a wrong picture. Those assertions used to leave
no trace at all: a passing one returned true and the only evidence the figure had
checked anything was that nothing crashed. The list below is what they actually said, collected
by running this generator with an observer installed — not a description of
what it is believed to check.
3 distinct claims across 5 sets of arguments, grouped below by shape — because most of them are one sentence with a different number in it, and how many separate times that sentence was put to the test is the informative part.
and every accuracy beats no preconditioner at all
one of the shifts the condition sweep is drawn over
the iteration count never gets worse as the preconditioner gets better
Against the rule
It draws a decomposition and prints its residual. It calls
preconditionSweep,
and every figure above carries the badge — which residualcheck verifies by looking
for it in the emitted SVG rather than by finding the call that builds one. A badge that is
constructed and then left out of the body is the failure that check exists for.
Across the library: the rule bites on 141
of 264 generators —
126 print a residual and
15 are exempt with a published reason;
123 factorise nothing.
Read from lib/residual-rule.js, which is the same body the gate enforces from,
and the gate's last check fails the build if this page and it disagree about any generator.
Where it is called
Changing this generator changes every figure on this list. That is what makes the list worth publishing rather than keeping in a check script.
A rank that is a number of digits
Ask a kernel block for two digits and it costs two columns; ask for fourteen and it costs nine. The curve is a straight line at 0.55 columns a decade, and the bound the geometry gives is a straight line too — at 3.32, which is the same shape and six times the price.
Two errors, and whose fault they areAn accuracy that is a backward error
Every backward error on this site is something an algorithm produced and somebody then measured. This one is a line in the program. Solving with a compressed matrix gives a residual that is the compression's own error, at a slope of 1.000 over ten decades, so the knob that sets the storage sets the backward error directly.
Iterating, instead of factorisingChanging the condition number on purpose
Preconditioning is usually introduced as a trick that makes an iteration converge faster. It is not a trick. It is solving a different system with the same solution and a condition number chosen rather than inherited, and the new condition number is computable.
Neither sparse nor denseThe accuracy worth paying for
Used as a preconditioner, a hierarchical representation gets better at every accuracy — the iteration count falls monotonically all the way to the tightest tolerance. The total work does not. Its minimum sits at a rank-one preconditioner on an easy problem and six decades further along on a hard one.
When the problem arrives againThe problem that arrives again
A hundred and thirty essays have solved a system once and measured how wrong the answer was. Almost no computation is shaped like that. A solve is one step of an outer loop, its answer is an input rather than a deliverable, and four quantities this collection has treated as accuracy requirements turn out to be assets with a shelf life.
Iterating, instead of factorisingThe rate the condition number predicts
Conjugate gradients converge at a rate governed by the square root of the condition number. That is a bound rather than an estimate, it is provable, and it is loose enough that provisioning iterations from it wastes nine out of ten.
Where the flop count stopped predicting the timeWhere the format starts paying
A hierarchical solve costs 1.48 times a dense factorisation at 64 unknowns and 0.16 times it at 512. The crossover is between 64 and 128, it walks right when the accuracy is tightened, and the exponent between consecutive sizes is 2.13, 1.93, 1.74 — falling towards one and never arriving.