Orderings for incomplete factorization preconditioning of nonsymmetric problems

Numerical experiments are presented whereby the effect of reorderings on th e convergence of preconditioned Krylov subspace methods for the solution of nonsymmetric linear systems is shown. The preconditioners used in this stu dy are different variants of incomplete factorizations. It is shown that ce rtain reorderings for direct methods, such as reverse Cuthill-McKee, can be very beneficial. The benefit can be seen in the reduction of the number of iterations and also in measuring the deviation of the preconditioned opera tor from the identity.