A New Coarsening Operator for the Optimal Preconditioning of the Dual and Primal Domain Decomposition Methods: Application to Problems with Severe Coefficient Jumps

We present an optimal preconditioning algorithm that is equally applicable to the dual (FETI) and primal (Balancing) Schur complement domain decomposition methods, and which successfully addresses the problems of subdomain heterogeneities including the effects of large jumps of coefficients. The proposed preconditioner is derived from energy principles and embeds a new coarsening operator that propagates the error globally and accelerates convergence. The resulting iterative solver is illustrated with the solution of highly heterogeneous elasticity problems.