General-purpose preconditioning for regularized interior point methods

Abstract: In this paper we present general-purpose preconditioners for regularized augmented systems arising from optimization problems, and their corresponding normal equations. We discuss positive definite preconditioners, suitable for CG and MINRES. We consider "sparsifications" which avoid situations in which eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrix may become complex. Special attention is given to systems arising from the application of regularized interior point methods to linear or nonlinear convex programming problems.