Fast computation of the Smith form of a sparse integer matrix

We present a new probabilistic algorithm to compute the Smith normal form of a sparse integer matrix . The algorithm treats A as a “black box”—A is only used to compute matrix-vector products and we do not access individual entries in A directly. The algorithm requires about black box evaluations for word-sized primes p and , plus additional bit operations. For sparse matrices this represents a substantial improvement over previously known algorithms. The new algorithm suffers from no “fill-in” or intermediate value explosion, and uses very little additional space. We also present an asymptotically fast algorithm for dense matrices which requires about bit operations, where O(MM(m)) operations are sufficient to multiply two matrices over a field. Both algorithms are probabilistic of the Monte Carlo type — on any input they return the correct answer with a controllable, exponentially small probability of error. Received: March 9, 2000.