Efficient parallelization of the iterative solution of a coupled fluid-structure interaction problem

In this paper we consider the parallelization of the generation and iterative solution of coupled linear systems modelling the interaction of an acoustic field in a fluid medium with an elastic structure immersed in the fluid. The particular case studied is that of a hollow steel sphere in water. The aim of the work is to speed up the generation and solution of the systems. We describe the methods used, which involve special sparse storage arrangements and a novel application of a sparse approximate inverse preconditioning technique, and present results showing that the methods are very effective in terms of speeding up the generation and iterative solution of the systems. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.