In this section, we take a brief look at the possibilities for parallel implementation. Table 7 shows a comparison between the block Gauss-Seidel and block Jacobi versions of the postconditioner . We see that the penalty of going from the sequential to the parallel algorithm is approximately a factor 2 if subdomains are solved inaccurately using GMRES. With IBLUD postconditioning on the other hand, this factor is much less than 2. Also, computing time on a single machine is minimized if IBLUD postconditioning is used. This means that we expect good results from parallelization of the IBLUD postconditioning.
Table 7: Comparison between the sequential (Gauss-Seidel) and
parallel (Jacobi) version of the postconditioner for
a decomposition into blocks.
In [2,3] parallelization of domain decomposition for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations using accurate solution of subdomains was investigated. The method performed well on a cluster of workstations. The reason was that with accurate solution of subdomains the parallelization is rather coarse grained. Furthermore, the reduction to a system of interface equations (8) made a very simple implementation possible.
The results of the present study show, however, that with the algorithms discussed in this paper, the domain decomposition method on a single machine will probably beat the current parallel implementation [2,3] in the near future. Parallelization of the algorithms of this report is also possible but involves a parallelization of the GCR method itself. As Table 7 shows, the number of iterations increases only slightly as the subdomain solution accuracy is lowered to . Therefore, the communication overhead remains almost constant while the amount of work decreases, which gives a lower computing time (about a factor 2). The most efficient algorithm on a single machine will probably not perform well on the cluster because then the number of iterations is much larger which increases the communication overhead significantly.