Among existing preconditioners, the level-of-fill ILU has been quite popular as a general-purpose technique. Experimental observations have shown that, when coupled with block techniques, these methods can be quite effective in solving realistic problems arising from various applications. In this work, we consider an extension of this kind of method which is suitable for parallel environments. Our method is developed from the framework of high performance sparse direct solvers. The main idea we propose is to define an adaptive blockwise incomplete factorization that is much more accurate (and numerically more robust) than the scalar incomplete factorizations commonly used to precondition iterative solvers. These requirements lead to a robust class of parallel preconditioners based on generalized versions of block ILU techniques.