Abstract. The Schur method for computing a matrix square root reduces the matrix to the Schur triangular form and then computes a square root of the triangular matrix. We show that by using either standard blocking or recursive blocking the computation of the square root of the triangular matrix can be made rich in matrix multiplication. Numerical experiments making appropriate use of level 3 BLAS show significant speedups over the point algorithm, both in the square root phase and in the algorithm as a whole. In parallel implementations, recursive blocking is found to provide better performance than standard blocking when the parallelism comes only from threaded BLAS, but the reverse is true when parallelism is explicitly expressed using OpenMP. The excellent numerical stability of the point algorithm is shown to be preserved by blocking. These results are extended to the real Schur method. Blocking is also shown to be effective for multiplying triangular matrices.

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Algorithms for computing matrix functions are typically tested by comparing the forward error with the product of the condition number and the unit roundoff. The forward error is computed with the aid of a reference solution, typically computed at high precision. An alternative approach is to use functional identities such as the "round trip tests" e log A = A and (A 1/p ) p = A, as are currently employed in a SciPy test module. We show how a linearized perturbation analysis for a functional identity allows the determination of a maximum residual consistent with backward stability of the constituent matrix function evaluations. Comparison of this maximum residual with a computed residual provides a necessary test for backward stability. We also show how the actual linearized backward error for these relations can be computed. Our approach makes use of Fréchet derivatives and estimates of their norms. Numerical experiments show that the proposed approaches are able both to detect instability and to confirm stability.

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