A preconditioner for the Schur complement matrix

A preconditioner for iterative solution of the interface problem in Schur Complement Domain Decomposition Methods is presented. This preconditioner is based on solving a global problem in a narrow strip around the interface. It requires much less memory and computing time than classical Neumann–Neumann preconditioner and its variants, and handles correctly the flux splitting among subdomains that share the interface. The aim of this work is to present a theoretical basis (regarding the behavior of Schur complement matrix spectra) and some simple numerical experiments conducted in a sequential environment as a motivation for adopting the proposed preconditioner. Efficiency, scalability, and implementation details on a production parallel finite element code [Sonzogni V, Yommi A, Nigro N, Storti M. A parallel finite element program on a Beowulf cluster. Adv Eng Software 2002;33(7–10):427–43; Storti M, Nigro N, Paz R, Dalcín L. PETSc-FEM: a general purpose, parallel, multi-physics FEM program, 1999–2006] can be found in works [Paz R, Storti M. An interface strip preconditioner for domain decomposition methods: application to hydrology. Int J Numer Methods Eng 2005;62(13):1873–94; Paz R, Nigro N, Storti M. On the efficiency and quality of numerical solutions in cfd problems using the interface strip preconditioner for domain decomposition methods. Int J Numer Methods Fluids, in press].Fil: Storti, Mario Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química; ArgentinaFil: Dalcin, Lisandro Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química; ArgentinaFil: Paz, Rodrigo Rafael. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química; ArgentinaFil: Yommi, Alejandra Karina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química; ArgentinaFil: Sonzogni, Victorio Enrique. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química; ArgentinaFil: Nigro, Norberto Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química; Argentin

A rapidly converging domain decomposition method for the Helmholtz equation

A new domain decomposition method is introduced for the heterogeneous 2-D and 3-D Helmholtz equations. Transmission conditions based on the perfectly matched layer (PML) are derived that avoid artificial reflections and match incoming and outgoing waves at the subdomain interfaces. We focus on a subdivision of the rectangular domain into many thin subdomains along one of the axes, in combination with a certain ordering for solving the subdomain problems and a GMRES outer iteration. When combined with multifrontal methods, the solver has near-linear cost in examples, due to very small iteration numbers that are essentially independent of problem size and number of subdomains. It is to our knowledge only the second method with this property next to the moving PML sweeping method.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, 6 tables - v2 accepted for publication in the Journal of Computational Physic

A class of alternate strip-based domain decomposition methods for elliptic partial differential Equations

The domain decomposition strategies proposed in this thesis are efficient preconditioning techniques with good parallelism properties for the discrete systems which arise from the finite element approximation of symmetric elliptic boundary value problems in two and three-dimensional Euclidean spaces. For two-dimensional problems, two new domain decomposition preconditioners are introduced, such that the condition number of the preconditioned system is bounded independently of the size of the subdomains and the finite element mesh size. First, the alternate strip-based (ASB2) preconditioner is based on the partitioning of the domain into a finite number of nonoverlapping strips without interior vertices. This preconditioner is obtained from direct solvers inside the strips and a direct fast Poisson solver on the edges between strips, and contains two stages. At each stage the strips change such that the edges between strips at one stage are perpendicular on the edges between strips at the other stage. Next, the alternate strip-based substructuring (ASBS2) preconditioner is a Schur complement solver for the case of a decomposition with multiple nonoverlapping subdomains and interior vertices. The subdomains are assembled into nonoverlapping strips such that the vertices of the strips are on the boundary of the given domain, the edges between strips align with the edges of the subdomains and their union contains all of the interior vertices of the initial decomposition. This preconditioner is produced from direct fast Poisson solvers on the edges between strips and the edges between subdo- mains inside strips, and also contains two stages such that the edges between strips at one stage are perpendicular on the edges between strips at the other stage. The extension to three-dimensional problems is via solvers on slices of the domain

A Domain Decomposition Preconditioner for Hermite Collocation Problems

We propose a preconditioning method for linear systems of equations arising from piecewise Hermite bicubic collocation applied to two dimensional elliptic PDEs with mixed boundary conditions. We construct an efficient, parallel preconditioner for the GMRES method. The main contribution of the paper is a novel interface preconditioner derived in the framework of substructuring and employing a local Hermite collocation discretization for the interface subproblems based on a hybrid fine-coarse mesh. Interface equations based on this mesh depend only weakly on unknowns associated with subdomains. The effectiveness of the proposed method is highlighted by numerical experiments that cover a variety of problems

Classical and all-floating FETI methods for the simulation of arterial tissues

High-resolution and anatomically realistic computer models of biological soft tissues play a significant role in the understanding of the function of cardiovascular components in health and disease. However, the computational effort to handle fine grids to resolve the geometries as well as sophisticated tissue models is very challenging. One possibility to derive a strongly scalable parallel solution algorithm is to consider finite element tearing and interconnecting (FETI) methods. In this study we propose and investigate the application of FETI methods to simulate the elastic behavior of biological soft tissues. As one particular example we choose the artery which is - as most other biological tissues - characterized by anisotropic and nonlinear material properties. We compare two specific approaches of FETI methods, classical and all-floating, and investigate the numerical behavior of different preconditioning techniques. In comparison to classical FETI, the all-floating approach has not only advantages concerning the implementation but in many cases also concerning the convergence of the global iterative solution method. This behavior is illustrated with numerical examples. We present results of linear elastic simulations to show convergence rates, as expected from the theory, and results from the more sophisticated nonlinear case where we apply a well-known anisotropic model to the realistic geometry of an artery. Although the FETI methods have a great applicability on artery simulations we will also discuss some limitations concerning the dependence on material parameters.Comment: 29 page

Domain decomposition methods for the parallel computation of reacting flows

Domain decomposition is a natural route to parallel computing for partial differential equation solvers. Subdomains of which the original domain of definition is comprised are assigned to independent processors at the price of periodic coordination between processors to compute global parameters and maintain the requisite degree of continuity of the solution at the subdomain interfaces. In the domain-decomposed solution of steady multidimensional systems of PDEs by finite difference methods using a pseudo-transient version of Newton iteration, the only portion of the computation which generally stands in the way of efficient parallelization is the solution of the large, sparse linear systems arising at each Newton step. For some Jacobian matrices drawn from an actual two-dimensional reacting flow problem, comparisons are made between relaxation-based linear solvers and also preconditioned iterative methods of Conjugate Gradient and Chebyshev type, focusing attention on both iteration count and global inner product count. The generalized minimum residual method with block-ILU preconditioning is judged the best serial method among those considered, and parallel numerical experiments on the Encore Multimax demonstrate for it approximately 10-fold speedup on 16 processors