Optimization of the hermitian and skew-Hermitian splitting iteration for saddle-point problems

We study the asymptotic rate of convergence of the alternating Hermitian/skewHermitian iteration for solving saddle-point problems arising in the discretization of elliptic partial differential equations. By a careful analysis of the iterative scheme at the continuous level we determine optimal convergence parameters for the model problem of the Poisson equation written in div-grad form. We show that the optimized convergence rate for small mesh parameter h is asymptotically 1 - O(h(1/2)). Furthermore we show that when the splitting is used as a preconditioner for a Krylov method, a different optimization leading to two clusters in the spectrum gives an optimal, h-independent, convergence rate. The theoretical analysis is supported by numerical experiments.