An Interface Strip Preconditioner for Domain Decomposition Methods: Application to the Coupled Surface and Groundwater Flow

In this paper, the efficiency of a parallelizable preconditioner for Domain Decomposition Methods in the context of the solution of non-symmetric linear equations arising from the discretization of the conservation laws in hydrology (e.g., the coupled surface and sub-surface flow over a freatic acuifer) is investigated. The Interface Strip Preconditioner (IS) proposed is based on solving a problem in a narrow strip around the interface. It requires much less memory and computing time than classical NeumannNeumann preconditioner, and handles correctly the flux splitting among subdomains that share the interface. The performance of this preconditioner is assessed with an analytical study of Schur complement matrix eigenvalues and numerical experiments conducted in a parallel computational environment (consisting of a Beowulf cluster of twenty-nodes). Mecánica Computacional Vol. XXIII, pp. 3165-3189 G.Buscaglia, E.Dari, O.Zamonsky (Eds.) Bariloche, Argentina, November 2004