Robust and scalable domain decomposition solvers for unfitted finite element methods

Unfitted finite element methods, e.g., extended finite element techniques or the so-called finite cell method, have a great potential for large scale simulations, since they avoid the generation of body-fitted meshes and the use of graph partitioning techniques, two main bottlenecks for problems with non-trivial geometries. However, the linear systems that arise from these discretizations can be much more ill-conditioned, due to the so-called small cut cell problem. The state-of-the-art approach is to rely on sparse direct methods, which have quadratic complexity and are thus not well suited for large scale simulations. In order to solve this situation, in this work we investigate the use of domain decomposition preconditioners (balancing domain decomposition by constraints) for unfitted methods. We observe that a straightforward application of these preconditioners to the unfitted case has a very poor behavior. As a result, we propose a customization of the classical BDDC methods based on the stiffness weighting operator and an improved definition of the coarse degrees of freedom in the definition of the preconditioner. These changes lead to a robust and algorithmically scalable solver able to deal with unfitted grids. A complete set of complex 3D numerical experiments shows the good performance of the proposed preconditioners.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Efficient Algebraic Two-Level Schwarz Preconditioner for Sparse Matrices

Domain decomposition methods are among the most efficient for solving sparse linear systems of equations. Their effectiveness relies on a judiciously chosen coarse space. Originally introduced and theoretically proved to be efficient for self-adjoint operators, spectral coarse spaces have been proposed in the past few years for indefinite and non-self-adjoint operators. This paper presents a new spectral coarse space that can be constructed in a fully-algebraic way unlike most existing spectral coarse spaces. We present theoretical convergence result for Hermitian positive definite diagonally dominant matrices. Numerical experiments and comparisons against state-of-the-art preconditioners in the multigrid community show that the resulting two-level Schwarz preconditioner is efficient especially for non-self-adjoint operators. Furthermore, in this case, our proposed preconditioner outperforms state-of-the-art preconditioners