Parallel Preconditioners for Plate Problem

This paper concerns the solution of plate bending problems in domains composed of rectangles. Domain decomposition (DD) is the basic tool used for both the parallelization of the conjugate gradient method and the construction of efficient parallel preconditioners. A so-called Dirich- let DD preconditioner for systems of linear equations arising from the fi- nite element approximation by non-conforming Adini elements is derived. It is based on the non-overlapping DD, a multilevel preconditioner for the Schur-complement and a fast, almost direct solution method for the Dirichlet problem in rectangular domains based on fast Fourier transform. Making use of Xu's theory of the auxiliary space method we construct an optimal preconditioner for plate problems discretized by conforming Bogner-Fox-Schmidt rectangles. Results of numerical experiments carried out on a multiprocessor sys- tem are given. For the test problems considered the number of iterations is bounded independent of the mesh sizes and independent of the number of subdomains. The resulting parallel preconditioned conjugate gradient method requiresO(h^-2 ln h^-1 ln epsilon^-11) arithmetical operations per processor in order to solve the finite element equations with the relative accuracy epsilon