A direct as well as iterative method(called the orthogonally accumulated projection method, or the OAP for short) for solving linear system of equations with symmetric coefficient matrix is introduced in this paper. With the Lanczos process the OAP creates a sequence of mutually orthogonal vectors, on the basis of which the projections of the unknown vectors are easily obtained, and thus the approximations to the unknown vectors can be simply constructed by a combination of these projections. This method is an application of the accumulated projection technique proposed recently by the authors of this paper, and can be regarded as a match of conjugate gradient method(CG) in its nature since both the CG and the OAP can be regarded as iterative methods, too. Unlike the CG method which can be only used to solve linear systems with symmetric positive definite coefficient matrices, the OAP can be used to handle systems with indefinite symmetric matrices. Unlike classical Krylov subspace methods which usually ignore the issue of loss of orthogonality, OAP uses an effective approach to detect the loss of orthogonality and a restart strategy is used to handle the loss of orthogonality.Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the OAP.
