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This paper presents a general method to associate the operator splitting for the Peaceman-Rachford procedure with a decomposition of the domain in problems arising from finite element discretization of partial differential equations. The algorithm is provably convergent without any symmetry requirement. Moreover, this method possesses the significant advantage of making the linear systems of the Peaceman-Rachford iteration block diagonal and therefore perfectly appropriate for parallel processing. Not only is sparsity not affected but a reduction of the bandwidth occurs. In fact, for appropriate choices of nonconforming finite element spaces, this method makes directly possible elementwise processing. This option remains available in general for higher-dimensional problems by applying the splitting algorithm recursively. Practical implementation requires nothing more than the standard finite element assembly procedure and some bookkeeping to relate a few different orderings of the nodes. In addition to all these attractive features, the method is rapidly convergent and remains highly competitive even when used on a serial machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]