Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The authors describe and test spai_1.1, a parallel MPI implementation of the sparse approximate inverse (SPAI) preconditioner. They show that SPAI can be very effective for solving a set of very large and difficult problems on a Cray T3E. The results clearly show the value of SPAI (and approximate inverse methods in general) as the viable alternative to ILU-type methods when facing very large and difficult problems. The authors strengthen this conclusion by showing that spai_1.1 also has very good scaling behavior.