Parallel preconditioners for saddle-point problems

Constraint preconditioners have proved very efficient for the solution of ill-conditioned saddle point problems in a sequential computing environment. Their implementation on parallel computers, however, is not straightforward because of their inherent sequentiality. The present paper describes a novel parallel inexact constraint preconditioner (ParICP) based on the use of the BFSAI-IC preconditioner. The ParICP performance is experimented with in large size saddle-point problems arising from the Finite Element (FE) simulation of coupled consolidation in saturated porous media, proving a scalable and efficient implementation of the constraint preconditioning for high performance computing. ParICP appears to be a very robust algorithm for solving ill-conditioned large size saddle-point problems in a parallel computing environment.