  We present original time-parallel algorithms for the solution of the implicit
Euler discretization of general linear parabolic evolution equations with
time-dependent self-adjoint spatial operators. Motivated by the inf-sup theory
of parabolic problems, we show that the standard nonsymmetric time-global
system can be equivalently reformulated as an original symmetric saddle-point
system that remains inf-sup stable with respect to the same natural parabolic
norms. We then propose and analyse an efficient and readily implementable
parallel-in-time preconditioner to be used with an inexact Uzawa method. The
proposed preconditioner is non-intrusive and easy to implement in practice, and
also features the key theoretical advantages of robust spectral bounds, leading
to convergence rates that are independent of the number of time-steps, final
time, or spatial mesh sizes, and also a theoretical parallel complexity that
grows only logarithmically with respect to the number of time-steps. Numerical
experiments with large-scale parallel computations show the effectiveness of
the method, along with its good weak and strong scaling properties.
