ARPACK

ARPACK, the ARnoldi PACKage, is a numerical software library written in FORTRAN 77 for solving large scale eigenvalue problems. The package is designed to compute a few eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors of large sparse or structured matrices, using the Implicitly Restarted Arnoldi Method (IRAM) or, in the case of symmetric matrices, the corresponding variant of the Lanczos algorithm. It is used by many popular numerical computing environments such as SciPy, Mathematica, GNU Octave and MATLAB to provide this functionality.

ARPACK uses the reverse communication interface to make it easy for a user to work with any sparse matrix format or provide a customized sparse matrix vector multiplication subroutine. When a matrix operation is required it returns control to the calling program with a flag indicating what operation is required. The calling program must then perform the operation and call the ARPACK routine again to continue. The operations are typically matrix-vector products, and solving linear systems.