A new level-dependent coarsegrid correction scheme for indefinite Helmholtz problems

In this paper we construct and analyse a level-dependent coarsegrid correction scheme for indefinite Helmholtz problems. This adapted multigrid method is capable of solving the Helmholtz equation on the finest grid using a series of multigrid cycles with a grid-dependent complex shift, leading to a stable correction scheme on all levels. It is rigourously shown that the adaptation of the complex shift throughout the multigrid cycle maintains the functionality of the two-grid correction scheme, as no smooth modes are amplified in or added to the error. In addition, a sufficiently smoothing relaxation scheme should be applied to ensure damping of the oscillatory error components. Numerical experiments on various benchmark problems show the method to be competitive with or even outperform the current state-of-the-art multigrid-preconditioned Krylov methods, like e.g. CSL-preconditioned GMRES or BiCGStab.Comment: 21 page

Local Fourier Analysis of the Complex Shifted Laplacian preconditioner for Helmholtz problems

In this paper we solve the Helmholtz equation with multigrid preconditioned Krylov subspace methods. The class of Shifted Laplacian preconditioners are known to significantly speed-up Krylov convergence. However, these preconditioners have a parameter beta, a measure of the complex shift. Due to contradictory requirements for the multigrid and Krylov convergence, the choice of this shift parameter can be a bottleneck in applying the method. In this paper, we propose a wavenumber-dependent minimal complex shift parameter which is predicted by a rigorous k-grid Local Fourier Analysis (LFA) of the multigrid scheme. We claim that, given any (regionally constant) wavenumber, this minimal complex shift parameter provides the reader with a parameter choice that leads to efficient Krylov convergence. Numerical experiments in one and two spatial dimensions validate the theoretical results. It appears that the proposed complex shift is both the minimal requirement for a multigrid V-cycle to converge, as well as being near-optimal in terms of Krylov iteration count.Comment: 20 page

Shifted Laplacian multigrid for the elastic Helmholtz equation

The shifted Laplacian multigrid method is a well known approach for preconditioning the indefinite linear system arising from the discretization of the acoustic Helmholtz equation. This equation is used to model wave propagation in the frequency domain. However, in some cases the acoustic equation is not sufficient for modeling the physics of the wave propagation, and one has to consider the elastic Helmholtz equation. Such a case arises in geophysical seismic imaging applications, where the earth's subsurface is the elastic medium. The elastic Helmholtz equation is much harder to solve than its acoustic counterpart, partially because it is three times larger, and partially because it models more complicated physics. Despite this, there are very few solvers available for the elastic equation compared to the array of solvers that are available for the acoustic one. In this work we extend the shifted Laplacian approach to the elastic Helmholtz equation, by combining the complex shift idea with approaches for linear elasticity. We demonstrate the efficiency and properties of our solver using numerical experiments for problems with heterogeneous media in two and three dimensions

On the indefinite Helmholtz equation: complex stretched absorbing boundary layers, iterative analysis, and preconditioning

This paper studies and analyzes a preconditioned Krylov solver for Helmholtz problems that are formulated with absorbing boundary layers based on complex coordinate stretching. The preconditioner problem is a Helmholtz problem where not only the coordinates in the absorbing layer have an imaginary part, but also the coordinates in the interior region. This results into a preconditioner problem that is invertible with a multigrid cycle. We give a numerical analysis based on the eigenvalues and evaluate the performance with several numerical experiments. The method is an alternative to the complex shifted Laplacian and it gives a comparable performance for the studied model problems

Complex additive geometric multilevel solvers for Helmholtz equations on spacetrees

We introduce a family of implementations of low-order, additive, geometric multilevel solvers for systems of Helmholtz equations arising from Schrödinger equations. Both grid spacing and arithmetics may comprise complex numbers, and we thus can apply complex scaling to the indefinite Helmholtz operator. Our implementations are based on the notion of a spacetree and work exclusively with a finite number of precomputed local element matrices. They are globally matrix-free. Combining various relaxation factors with two grid transfer operators allows us to switch from additive multigrid over a hierarchical basis method into a Bramble-Pasciak-Xu (BPX)-type solver, with several multiscale smoothing variants within one code base. Pipelining allows us to realize full approximation storage (FAS) within the additive environment where, amortized, each grid vertex carrying degrees of freedom is read/written only once per iteration. The codes realize a single-touch policy. Among the features facilitated by matrix-free FAS is arbitrary dynamic mesh refinement (AMR) for all solver variants. AMR as an enabler for full multigrid (FMG) cycling—the grid unfolds throughout the computation—allows us to reduce the cost per unknown. The present work primary contributes toward software realization and design questions. Our experiments show that the consolidation of single-touch FAS, dynamic AMR, and vectorization-friendly, complex scaled, matrix-free FMG cycles delivers a mature implementation blueprint for solvers of Helmholtz equations in general. For this blueprint, we put particular emphasis on a strict implementation formalism as well as some implementation correctness proofs

Analyzing the wave number dependency of the convergence rate of a multigrid preconditioned Krylov method for the Helmholtz equation with an absorbing layer

This paper analyzes the Krylov convergence rate of a Helmholtz problem preconditioned with Multigrid. The multigrid method is applied to the Helmholtz problem formulated on a complex contour and uses GMRES as a smoother substitute at each level. A one-dimensional model is analyzed both in a continuous and discrete way. It is shown that the Krylov convergence rate of the continuous problem is independent of the wave number. The discrete problem, however, can deviate significantly from this bound due to a pitchfork in the spectrum. It is further shown in numerical experiments that the convergence rate of the Krylov method approaches the continuous bound as the grid distance $h$ gets small