Overlapping for preconditioners based on incomplete factorizations and nested arrow form

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the usage of overlapping techniques for improving the convergence of preconditioners based on incomplete factorizations. To enable parallelism, these preconditioners are usually applied after the input matrix is permuted into a nested arrow form using k-way nested dissection. This graph partitioning technique uses k-way partitionning by vertex separator to recursively partition the graph of the input matrix into k subgraphs using a subset of its vertices called a separator. The overlapping technique is then based on algebraically extending the associated subdomains of these subgraphs and their corresponding separators obtained from k-way nested dissection by their direct neighbours. A similar approach is known to accelerate the convergence of domain decomposition methods, where the input matrix is partitioned into a number of independent subdomains using k-way vertex partitioning of a graph by edge separators, a different graph decomposition technique. We discuss the effect of the overlapping technique on the convergence of two classes of preconditioners, on the basis of nested factorization and block incomplete LDU factorization.