Space-time block preconditioning for incompressible flow
arXiv.org > Mathematics > Numerical Analysis, (2021)Abstract
Parallel-in-time methods have become increasingly popular in the simulation
of time-dependent numerical PDEs, allowing for the efficient use of additional
MPI processes when spatial parallelism saturates. Most methods treat the
solution and parallelism in space and time separately. In contrast, all-at-once
methods solve the full space-time system directly, largely treating time as
simply another spatial dimension. All-at-once methods offer a number of
benefits over separate treatment of space and time, most notably significantly
increased parallelism and faster time-to-solution (when applicable). However,
the development of fast, scalable all-at-once methods has largely been limited
to time-dependent (advection-)diffusion problems. This paper introduces the
concept of space-time block preconditioning for the all-at-once solution of
incompressible flow. By extending well-known concepts of spatial block
preconditioning to the space-time setting, we develop a block preconditioner
whose application requires the solution of a space-time (advection-)diffusion
equation in the velocity block, coupled with a pressure Schur complement
approximation consisting of independent spatial solves at each time-step, and a
space-time matrix-vector multiplication. The new method is tested on four
classical models in incompressible flow. Results indicate perfect scalability
in refinement of spatial and temporal mesh spacing, perfect scalability in
nonlinear Picard iterations count when applied to a nonlinear Navier-Stokes
problem, and minimal overhead in terms of number of preconditioner applications
compared with sequential time-stepping.
