An interface strip preconditioner for domain decomposition methods: Application to hydrology

Abstract

In this paper, the efficiency of a parallelizable preconditioner for Domain Decomposition Methods in the context of the solution of non-symmetric linear equations arising from discretization of the Saint-Venant equations, is investigated. The proposed Interface Strip Preconditioner (IS) is based on solving a problem in a narrow strip around the interface. It requires much less memory and computing time than classical Neumann-Neumann preconditioner, and handles correctly the flux splitting among sub-domains that share the interface. The performance of this preconditioner is assessed with an analytical study of Schur complement matrix eigenvalues and numerical experiments conducted in a 2 parallel computational environment (consisting of a Beowulf cluster of twenty-nodes). [International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering 62(13), pp. 1873-1894 (2005)]