Abstract. The recent advances in microarchitectural bone imaging are disclosing the possibility to assess both the apparent density and the trabecular microstructure of intact bones in a single measurement. Coupling these imaging possibilities with microstructural finite element (µFE) analysis offers a powerful tool to improve bone stiffness and strength assessment for individual fracture risk prediction.Many elements are needed to accurately represent the intricate microarchitectural structure of bone; hence, the resulting µFE models possess a very large number of degrees of freedom. In order to be solved quickly and reliably on state-of-the-art parallel computers, the µFE analyses require advanced solution techniques. In this paper, we investigate the solution of the resulting systems of linear equations by the conjugate gradient algorithm, preconditioned by aggregation-based multigrid methods. We introduce a variant of the preconditioner that does not need assembling the system matrix but uses element-by-element techniques to build the multilevel hierarchy. The preconditioner exploits the voxel approach that is common in bone structure analysis, it has modest memory requirements, while being at the same time robust and scalable.Using the proposed methods, we have solved in less than 10 minutes a model of trabecular bone composed of 247'734'272 elements, leading to a matrix with 1'178'736'360 rows, using only 1024 CRAY XT3 processors. The ability to solve, for the first time, large biomedical problems with over 1 billion degrees of freedom on a routine basis will help us improve our understanding of the influence of densitometric, morphological and loading factors in the etiology of osteoporotic fractures such as commonly experienced at the hip, the spine and the wrist.

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SUMMARYThis study investigates algebraic multilevel domain decomposition preconditioners of the Schwarz type for solving linear systems associated with Newton-Krylov methods. The key component of the preconditioner is a coarse approximation based on algebraic multigrid ideas to approximate the global behaviour of the linear system. The algebraic multilevel preconditioner is based on an aggressive coarsening graph partitioning of the non-zero block structure of the Jacobian matrix. The scalability of the preconditioner is presented as well as comparisons with a two-level Schwarz preconditioner using a geometric coarse grid operator. These comparisons are obtained on large-scale distributed-memory parallel machines for systems arising from incompressible flow and transport using a stabilized finite element formulation. The results demonstrate the influence of the smoothers and coarse level solvers for a set of 3D example problems. For preconditioners with more than one level, careful attention needs to be given to the balance of robustness and convergence rate for the smoothers and the cost of applying these methods. For properly chosen parameters, the two-and three-level preconditioners are demonstrated to be scalable to 1024 processors.