THE AUGMENTED BLOCK CIMMINO DISTRIBUTED METHOD.

We introduce and study a novel way of accelerating the convergence of the block Cimmino method by augmenting the matrix so that the subspaces corresponding to the partitions are orthogonal. This results in a requirement to solve a relatively smaller symmetric positive definite system. We discuss several issues involved in a parallel implementation and illustrate the performance of our method on some realistic test problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]