III. Strategies for preconditioning methods of parallel iterative solvers for finite-element applications in geophysics

Abstract

Solving large-scale systems of linear equations [A]{x} = {b} is one of the most expensive and critical processes in scientific computing. In particular, for simulation codes based on the finite-element method (FEM), most of the computational time is devoted to solving linear equation systems with sparse coefficient matrices. For this reason, a significant proportion of scalable algorithm research and development is aimed at solving these large, sparse linear systems of equations on parallel computers. Sparse linear solvers can be broadly classified as being either direct or iterative. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.