Performance of parallel-in-time integration for Rayleigh Bénard convection

Rayleigh–Bénard convection (RBC) is a fundamental problem of fluid dynamics, with many applications to geophysical, astrophysical, and industrial flows. Understanding RBC at parameter regimes of interest requires complex physical or numerical experiments. Numerical simulations require large amounts of computational resources; in order to more efficiently use the large numbers of processors now available in large high performance computing clusters, novel parallelisation strategies are required. To this end, we investigate the performance of the parallel-in-time algorithm Parareal when used in numerical simulations of RBC. We present the first parallel-in-time speedups for RBC simulations at finite Prandtl number. We also investigate the problem of convergence of Parareal with respect to statistical numerical quantities, such as the Nusselt number, and discuss the importance of reliable online stopping criteria in these cases

A parallel implementation of a diagonalization-based parallel-in-time integrator

We present and analyze a parallel implementation of a parallel-in-time method based on $\alpha$-circulant preconditioned Richardson iterations. While there are a lot of papers exploring this new class of single-level, time-parallel integrators from many perspectives, performance results of actual parallel runs are still missing. This leaves a critical gap, because the efficiency and applicability heavily rely on the actual parallel performance, with only limited guidance from theoretical considerations. Also, many challenges like selecting good parameters, finding suitable communication strategies, and performing a fair comparison to sequential time-stepping methods can be easily missed. In this paper, we first extend the original idea by using a collocation method of arbitrary order, which adds another level of parallelization in time. We derive an adaptive strategy to select a new $\alpha$-circulant preconditioner for each iteration during runtime for balancing convergence rates, round-off errors and inexactness in the individual time-steps. After addressing these more theoretical challenges, we present an open-source space- and doubly-time-parallel implementation and evaluate its performance for two different test problems

Parallel-in-Time Multi-Level Integration of the Shallow-Water Equations on the Rotating Sphere

The modeling of atmospheric processes in the context of weather and climate simulations is an important and computationally expensive challenge. The temporal integration of the underlying PDEs requires a very large number of time steps, even when the terms accounting for the propagation of fast atmospheric waves are treated implicitly. Therefore, the use of parallel-in-time integration schemes to reduce the time-to-solution is of increasing interest, particularly in the numerical weather forecasting field. We present a multi-level parallel-in-time integration method combining the Parallel Full Approximation Scheme in Space and Time (PFASST) with a spatial discretization based on Spherical Harmonics (SH). The iterative algorithm computes multiple time steps concurrently by interweaving parallel high-order fine corrections and serial corrections performed on a coarsened problem. To do that, we design a methodology relying on the spectral basis of the SH to coarsen and interpolate the problem in space. The methods are evaluated on the shallow-water equations on the sphere using a set of tests commonly used in the atmospheric flow community. We assess the convergence of PFASST-SH upon refinement in time. We also investigate the impact of the coarsening strategy on the accuracy of the scheme, and specifically on its ability to capture the high-frequency modes accumulating in the solution. Finally, we study the computational cost of PFASST-SH to demonstrate that our scheme resolves the main features of the solution multiple times faster than the serial schemes

Numerical wave propagation aided by deep learning

We propose a deep learning approach for wave propagation in media with multiscale wave speed, using a second-order linear wave equation model. We use neural networks to enhance the accuracy of a given inaccurate coarse solver, which under-resolves a class of multiscale wave media and wave fields of interest. Our approach involves generating training data by the given computationally efficient coarse solver and another sufficiently accurate solver, applied to a class of wave media (described by their wave speed profiles) and initial wave fields. We find that the trained neural networks can approximate the nonlinear dependence of the propagation on the wave speed as long as the causality is appropriately sampled in training data. We combine the neural-network-enhanced coarse solver with the parareal algorithm and demonstrate that the coupled approach improves the stability of parareal algorithms for wave propagation and improves the accuracy of the enhanced coarse solvers