<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this paper we examine the identification problem of the heat sink for a one dimensional heat equation through observations of the solution at the boundary or through a desired temperature profile to be attained at a certain given time. We make use of pseudo-spectral methods to recast the direct as well as the inverse problem in terms of linear systems in matrix form. The resulting evolution equations in finite dimensional spaces leads to fast real time algorithms which are crucial to applied control theory.</p>