Accelerating exponential integrators to efficiently solve advection-diffusion-reaction equations

In this paper we consider an approach to improve the performance of exponential integrators/Lawson schemes in cases where the solution of a related, but usually much simpler, problem can be computed efficiently. While for implicit methods such an approach is common (e.g. by using preconditioners), for exponential integrators this has proven more challenging. Here we propose to extract a constant coefficient differential operator from advection-diffusion-reaction equations for which we are then able to compute the required matrix functions efficiently. Both a linear stability analysis and numerical experiments show that the resulting schemes can be unconditionally stable. In fact, we find that exponential integrators and Lawson schemes can have better stability properties than similarly constructed implicit-explicit schemes. We also propose new Lawson type integrators that further improve on these stability properties. The effectiveness of the approach is highlighted by a number of numerical examples in two and three space dimensions

Solving periodic semilinear stiff PDEs in 1D, 2D and 3D with exponential integrators

Dozens of exponential integration formulas have been proposed for the high-accuracy solution of stiff PDEs such as the Allen-Cahn, Korteweg-de Vries and Ginzburg-Landau equations. We report the results of extensive comparisons in MATLAB and Chebfun of such formulas in 1D, 2D and 3D, focusing on fourth and higher order methods, and periodic semilinear stiff PDEs with constant coefficients. Our conclusion is that it is hard to do much better than one of the simplest of these formulas, the ETDRK4 scheme of Cox and Matthews

Exponential Integrators on Graphic Processing Units

In this paper we revisit stencil methods on GPUs in the context of exponential integrators. We further discuss boundary conditions, in the same context, and show that simple boundary conditions (for example, homogeneous Dirichlet or homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions) do not affect the performance if implemented directly into the CUDA kernel. In addition, we show that stencil methods with position-dependent coefficients can be implemented efficiently as well. As an application, we discuss the implementation of exponential integrators for different classes of problems in a single and multi GPU setup (up to 4 GPUs). We further show that for stencil based methods such parallelization can be done very efficiently, while for some unstructured matrices the parallelization to multiple GPUs is severely limited by the throughput of the PCIe bus.Comment: To appear in: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on High Performance Computing Simulation (HPCS 2013), IEEE (2013

Krylov implicit integration factor discontinuous Galerkin methods on sparse grids for high dimensional reaction-diffusion equations

Computational costs of numerically solving multidimensional partial differential equations (PDEs) increase significantly when the spatial dimensions of the PDEs are high, due to large number of spatial grid points. For multidimensional reaction-diffusion equations, stiffness of the system provides additional challenges for achieving efficient numerical simulations. In this paper, we propose a class of Krylov implicit integration factor (IIF) discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods on sparse grids to solve reaction-diffusion equations on high spatial dimensions. The key ingredient of spatial DG discretization is the multiwavelet bases on nested sparse grids, which can significantly reduce the numbers of degrees of freedom. To deal with the stiffness of the DG spatial operator in discretizing reaction-diffusion equations, we apply the efficient IIF time discretization methods, which are a class of exponential integrators. Krylov subspace approximations are used to evaluate the large size matrix exponentials resulting from IIF schemes for solving PDEs on high spatial dimensions. Stability and error analysis for the semi-discrete scheme are performed. Numerical examples of both scalar equations and systems in two and three spatial dimensions are provided to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the methods. The stiffness of the reaction-diffusion equations is resolved well and large time step size computations are obtained

Evaluating matrix functions for exponential integrators via Carathéodory-Fejér approximation and contour integrals

Among the fastest methods for solving stiff PDE are exponential integrators, which require the evaluation of $f(A)$, where $A$ is a negative definite matrix and $f$ is the exponential function or one of the related ``$\varphi$ functions'' such as $\varphi_1(z) = (e^z-1)/z$. Building on previous work by Trefethen and Gutknecht, Gonchar and Rakhmanov, and Lu, we propose two methods for the fast evaluation of $f(A)$ that are especially useful when shifted systems $(A+zI)x=b$ can be solved efficiently, e.g. by a sparse direct solver. The first method method is based on best rational approximations to $f$ on the negative real axis computed via the Carathéodory-Fejér procedure, and we conjecture that the accuracy scales as $(9.28903\dots)^{-2n}$, where $n$ is the number of complex matrix solves. In particular, three matrix solves suffice to evaluate $f(A)$ to approximately six digits of accuracy. The second method is an application of the trapezoid rule on a Talbot-type contour

Fourth-order time-stepping for stiff PDEs on the sphere

We present in this paper algorithms for solving stiff PDEs on the unit sphere with spectral accuracy in space and fourth-order accuracy in time. These are based on a variant of the double Fourier sphere method in coefficient space with multiplication matrices that differ from the usual ones, and implicit-explicit time-stepping schemes. Operating in coefficient space with these new matrices allows one to use a sparse direct solver, avoids the coordinate singularity and maintains smoothness at the poles, while implicit-explicit schemes circumvent severe restrictions on the time-steps due to stiffness. A comparison is made against exponential integrators and it is found that implicit-explicit schemes perform best. Implementations in MATLAB and Chebfun make it possible to compute the solution of many PDEs to high accuracy in a very convenient fashion