This licentiate thesis is a part of an effort to run large electronic structure calculations in modern computational environments with distributed memory. The ultimate goal is to model materials consisting of millions of atoms at the level of quantum mechanics. In particular, the thesis focuses on different aspects of a computational problem of inverse factorization of Hermitian positive definite matrices. The considered aspects are numerical properties of the algorithms and parallelization. Not only is an efficient and scalable computation of inverse factors necessary in order to be able to run large scale electronic computations based on the Hartree–Fock or Kohn–Sham approaches with the self-consistent field procedure, but it can be applied more generally for preconditioner construction.

Parallelization of algorithms with unknown load and data distributions requires a paradigm shift in programming. In this thesis we also discuss a few parallel programming models with focus on task-based models, and, more specifically, the Chunks and Tasks model.