A Robust Preconditioner on the CRAY-T3E for Large Nonsymmetric Sparse Linear Systems

Abstract

In this paper we propose a block-type parallel preconditioner for solving large sparse nonsymmetric linear systems, which we expect to be scalable. It is MultiColor Block SOR preconditioner, combined with direct sparse matrix solver. For the Laplacian matrix the SOR method is known to have a nondeteriorating rate of convergence when used with Multi-Color ordering. Since most of the time is spent on the diagonal inversion, which is done on each processor, we expect it to be a good scalable preconditioner. Finally, due to the blocking effect, it will be effective for ill-conditioned problems. We compared it with four other preconditioners, which are ILU(0)-wavefront ordering, ILU(0)-Multi-Color ordering, SPAI(SParse Approximate Inverse), and SSOR preconditioner. Experiments were conducted for the Finite Difference discretizations of two problems with various meshsizes varying up to 1024 x 1024 , and for an ill-conditioned matrix from the shell problem from the Harwell-Boeing collection. CRAY-T3E with 128 nodes was used. MPI library was used for interprocess communications. The results show that Multi-Color Block SOR and ILU(0) with Multi-Color ordering give the best performances for the finite difference matrices and for the shell problem only the Multi-Color Block SOR converges.