The numerical solution of large-scale PDEs, such as those occurring in
data-driven applications, unavoidably require powerful parallel computers and
tailored parallel algorithms to make the best possible use of them. In fact,
considerations about the parallelization and scalability of realistic problems
are often critical enough to warrant acknowledgement in the modelling phase.
The purpose of this paper is to spread awareness of the Probabilistic Domain
Decomposition (PDD) method, a fresh approach to the parallelization of PDEs
with excellent scalability properties. The idea exploits the stochastic
representation of the PDE and its approximation via Monte Carlo in combination
with deterministic high-performance PDE solvers. We describe the ingredients of
PDD and its applicability in the scope of data science. In particular, we
highlight recent advances in stochastic representations for nonlinear PDEs
using branching diffusions, which have significantly broadened the scope of
PDD.
We envision this work as a dictionary giving large-scale PDE practitioners
references on the very latest algorithms and techniques of a non-standard, yet
highly parallelizable, methodology at the interface of deterministic and
probabilistic numerical methods. We close this work with an invitation to the
fully nonlinear case and open research questions.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures; Final SMUR version; To appear in the European
Journal of Applied Mathematics (EJAM
