Parallel Preconditioners for Stokes Flow

This report compares parallel preconditioners for 3D Stokes ow. Its motivation lies in Amphi3D, a diffuse interface algorithm simulating three dimensional interfacial dynamics of complex fluids, the parallelization of which has to date been ineffective due to the lack of an efficient parallel preconditioner. The approach taken here is to evaluate the Block Jacobi, Parallel ILU and Sparse approximate inverse parallel preconditioners on the reduced problem of Stokes flow for a small range of Reynolds numbers. Although surprisingly good results are achieved without preconditioning, it is the sparse approximate inverse preconditioner that delivers the most promising results.