ARPACK is a collection of Fortran77 subroutines designed to solve large scale eigenvalue problems. The package is designed to compute a few eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors of a general n by n matrix A. It is most appropriate for large sparse or structured matrices A where structured means that a matrix-vector product w <- Av requires order n rather than the usual order n2 floating point operations. This software is based upon an algorithmic variant of the Arnoldi process called the Implicitly Restarted Arnoldi Method (IRAM). When the matrix A is symmetric it reduces to a variant of the Lanczos process called the Implicitly Restarted Lanczos Method (IRLM). These variants may be viewed as a synthesis of the Arnoldi/Lanczos process with the Implicitly Shifted QR technique that is suitable for large scale problems. For many standard problems, a matrix factorization is not required; only the action of the matrix on a vector is needed. ARPACK is capable of solving large scale symmetric, nonsymmetric, and generalized eigenproblems from significant application areas.

A common community-maintained repository for this software, ARPACK-NG (ascl:2306.049), is available.

ARPACK-NG provides a common repository with maintained versions and a test suite for the ARPACK (ascl:1311.010) code, which is no longer updated; it is a collection of Fortran77 subroutines designed to solve large scale eigenvalue problems. ARPACK-NG offers routines for banded matrices, singular value decomposition, single and double precision real arithmetic versions for symmetric, non-symmetric standard or generalized problems, and a reverse communication interface (RCI). It also provides example driver routines that may be used as templates to implement numerous shift-invert strategies for all problem types, data types and precision, in addition to other tools. The ARPACK-NG project, started by Debian, Octave, and Scilab, is now a community project maintained by volunteers.