Parallel-iterated Runge-Kutta methods for stiff ordinary differential equations

Abstract

AbstractFor the numerical integration of a stiff ordinary differential equation, fully implicit Runge-Kutta methods offer nice properties, like a high classical order and high stage order as well as an excellent stability behaviour. However, such methods need the solution of a set of highly coupled equations for the stage values and this is a considerable computational task. This paper discusses an iteration scheme to tackle this problem. By means of a suitable choice of the iteration parameters, the implicit relations for the stage values, as they occur in each iteration, can be uncoupled so that they can be solved in parallel. The resulting scheme can be cast into the class of Diagonally Implicit Runge-Kutta (DIRK) methods and, similar to these methods, requires only one LU factorization per step (per processor). The stability as well as the computational efficiency of the process strongly depends on the particular choice of the iteration parameters and on the number of iterations performed. We discuss several choices to obtain good stability and fast convergence. Based on these approaches, we wrote two codes possessing local error control and stepsize variation. We have implemented both codes on an ALLIANT FX/4 machine (four parallel vector processors and shared memory) and measured their speedup factors for a number of test problems. Furthermore, the performance of these codes is compared with the performance of the best stiff ODE codes for sequential computers, like SIMPLE, LSODE and RADAU5