Exploiting spatial symmetries for solving Poisson's equation

This paper presents a strategy to accelerate virtually any Poisson solver by taking advantage of s spatial reflection symmetries. More precisely, we have proved the existence of an inexpensive block diagonalisation that transforms the original Poisson equation into a set of 2s fully decoupled subsystems then solved concurrently. This block diagonalisation is identical regardless of the mesh connectivity (structured or unstructured) and the geometric complexity of the problem, therefore applying to a wide range of academic and industrial configurations. In fact, it simplifies the task of discretising complex geometries since it only requires meshing a portion of the domain that is then mirrored implicitly by the symmetries’ hyperplanes. Thus, the resulting meshes naturally inherit the exploited symmetries, and their memory footprint becomes 2s times smaller. Thanks to the subsystems’ better spectral properties, iterative solvers converge significantly faster. Additionally, imposing an adequate grid points’ ordering allows reducing the operators’ footprint and replacing the standard sparse matrix-vector products with the sparse matrixmatrix product, a higher arithmetic intensity kernel. As a result, matrix multiplications are accelerated, and massive simulations become more affordable. Finally, we include numerical experiments based on a turbulent flow simulation and making state-of-theart solvers exploit a varying number of symmetries. On the one hand, algebraic multigrid and preconditioned Krylov subspace methods require up to 23% and 72% fewer iterations, resulting in up to 1.7x and 5.6x overall speedups, respectively. On the other, sparse direct solvers’ memory footprint, setup and solution costs are reduced by up to 48%, 58% and 46%, respectively.This work has been financially supported by two competitive R+D projects: RETOtwin (PDC2021-120970-I00), given by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and European Union Next GenerationEU/PRTR, and FusionCAT (001-P-001722), given by Generalitat de Catalunya RIS3CAT-FEDER. Àdel Alsalti-Baldellou has also been supported by the predoctoral grants DIN2018-010061 and 2019-DI-90, given by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR), respectively.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version