Yao, Aixiang I Song2014-03-142014-03-141998-02-05etd-12398-18633http://hdl.handle.net/10919/36499The primary motivation of this research is to develop and investigate parallel preconditioners for linear elliptic partial differential equations. Three preconditioners are studied: block-Jacobi preconditioner (BJ), a two-level tangential preconditioner (D0), and a three-level preconditioner (D1). Performance and scalability on a distributed memory parallel computer are considered. Communication cost and redundancy are explored as well. After experiments and analysis, we find that the three-level preconditioner D1 is the most efficient and scalable parallel preconditioner, compared to BJ and D0. The D1 preconditioner reduces both the number of iterations and computational time substantially. A new hybrid preconditioner is suggested which may combine the best features of D0 and D1.In Copyrightdomain decompositionpreconditionerparallel computingPDEdistributed systemsThesishttp://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-12398-18633/