On the discrete adjoints of adaptive time stepping algorithms

  • Authors:

  • Mihai Alexe;Adrian Sandu

  • Affiliations:

  • Computational Science Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2202 Kraft Drive, Blacksburg, VA, 24060, USA;Computational Science Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2202 Kraft Drive, Blacksburg, VA, 24060, USA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We investigate the behavior of adaptive time stepping numerical algorithms under the reverse mode of automatic differentiation (AD). By differentiating the time step controller and the error estimator of the original algorithm, reverse mode AD generates spurious adjoint derivatives of the time steps. The resulting discrete adjoint models become inconsistent with the adjoint ODE, and yield incorrect derivatives. To regain consistency, one has to cancel out the contributions of the non-physical derivatives in the discrete adjoint model. We demonstrate that the discrete adjoint models of one-step, explicit adaptive algorithms, such as the Runge-Kutta schemes, can be made consistent with their continuous counterparts using simple code modifications. Furthermore, we extend the analysis to cover second order adjoint models derived through an extra forward mode differentiation of the discrete adjoint code. Several numerical examples support the mathematical derivations.