Abstract This paper presents a numerical investigation for the computation of wind or marine current turbines in a farm. A 3D unsteady Lagrangian vortex method is used together with a panel method in order to take into account for the turbines. In order to enforce the boundary condition onto the panel elements, a linear matrix system is defined. Solving general linear matrix systems is a topic with important scientific literature. But the main concern here is the application to a dedicated matrix which is non-sparse, non-symmetric, neither diagonally dominant nor positive-definite. Several iterative approaches were tested and compared. But after some numerical tests, a Bi-CGSTAB method was finally chosen. The main advantage of the presented method is the use of a specific preconditioner well suited for the desired application. The chosen implementation proved to be very efficient with only 3 iterations of our preconditioned Bi-CGSTAB algorithm whatever the turbine geometrical configuration. Although developed for wind or marine turbines, the proposed algorithm is absolutely not restricted to these cases, and can be applied to many others. At the end of the paper, some applications (specifically, wake computations) in a farm are presented, along with a quantitative assessment of the computational time savings brought by the iterative approach.