  The numerical and computational aspects of the overlap formalism in lattice
quantum chromodynamics are extremely demanding due to a matrix-vector product
that involves the sign function of the hermitian Wilson matrix. In this paper
we investigate several methods to compute the product of the matrix
sign-function with a vector, in particular Lanczos based methods and partial
fraction expansion methods. Our goal is two-fold: we give realistic comparisons
between known methods together with novel approaches and we present error
bounds which allow to guarantee a given accuracy when terminating the Lanczos
method and the multishift-CG solver, applied within the partial fraction
expansion methods.
