A novel parallel preconditioner for ill-conditioned FE consolidation problems

Constraint preconditioners have proved very effi cient for the solution of ill-conditioned FE coupled consolidation problems on sequential computers. 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 a large size FE coupled consolidation problem arising from a real geomechanical application, proving a scalable, efficient and very robust implementation of constraint preconditioning for high performance computing.