Bilus: A block version of ilus factorization

ILUS factorization has many desirable properties such as its amenability to the skyline format, the ease with which stability may be monitored, and the possibility of constructing a preconditioner with symmetric structure. In this paper we introduce a new preconditioning technique for general sparse linear systems based on the ILUS factorization strategy. The resulting preconditioner has the same properties as the ILUS preconditioner. Some theoretical properties of the new preconditioner are discussed and numerical experiments on test matrices from the Harwell-Boeing collection are tested. Our results indicate that the new preconditioner is cheaper to construct than the ILUS preconditioner.