Pii: S0168-9274(98)00095-6

Solution of large linear systems encountered in computational fluid dynamics often naturally leads to some form of domain decomposition, especially when it is desired to use parallel machines. It has been proposed to use approximate solvers to obtain fast but rough solutions on the separate subdomains. In this paper approximate solutions via (1) an inner preconditioned GMRES iteration to fixed tolerance, and (2) incomplete factorization (RILU, restricted to the diagonal) are considered. Numerical experiments for a fundamental test problem are included which show speedups obtained on a cluster of workstations as well as on a distributed memory parallel computer. Additionally, the parallel implementation of GCR is addressed, with particular focus on communication costs associated with orthogonalization processes. This consideration brings up questions concerning the use of Householder reflections with GCR.  1999 Elsevier Science B.V. and IMACS. All rights reserved.