A block preconditioner for scalable large scale finite element incompressible flow simulations

Abstract

We present a block preconditioner, based on the algebraic multigrid method, for solving systems of linear equations, that arise in incompressible flow simulations performed by the stabilized finite element method. We select a set of adjustable parameters for the preconditioner and show how to tune the parameters in order to obtain fast convergence of the standard GMRES solver in which the preconditioner is employed. Additionally, we show some details of the parallel implementation of the preconditioner and the achieved scalability of the solver in large scale parallel incompressible flow simulations.