Parallel efficiency of monolithic and fixed-strain solution strategies for poroelasticity problems

Abstract: Poroelasticity is an example of coupled processes which are crucial for many applications including safety assessment of radioactive waste repositories. Numerical solution of poroelasticity problems discretized with finite volume -- virtual element scheme leads to systems of algebraic equations, which may be solved simultaneously or iteratively. In this work, parallel scalability of the monolithic strategy and of the fixed-strain splitting strategy is examined, which depends mostly on linear solver performance. It was expected that splitting strategy would show better scalability due to better performance of a black-box linear solver on systems with simpler structure. However, this is not always the case.