Abstract
In this paper the parallel solution of block tridiagonal linear systems derived from the finite difference/element discretisation of 2D/3D elliptic partial differential equations which occur frequently in scientific and engineering applications is presented. The direct solution by the Gaussian elimination algorithm is used and a parallel architecture designed employing a systolic array (SATS) which comprises of triangular and rectangular systolic arrays to perform the block triangularisation of the system. The block triangular system is then solved by a pipeline using local memory systems. The results show that when the system order is > 10 then the speedup of the parallel system is significant