Preconditioning fractional spectral collocation

Abstract: Fractional spectral collocation (FSC) method based on fractional Lagrange interpolation has recently been proposed to solve fractional differential equations. Numerical experiments show that the linear systems in FSC become extremely ill-conditioned as the number of collocation points increases. By introducing suitable fractional Birkhoff interpolation problems, we present fractional integration preconditioning matrices for the ill-conditioned linear systems in FSC. The condition numbers of the resulting linear systems are independent of the number of collocation points. Numerical examples are given.