A Parallel Geometric Multigrid Method for Finite Elements on Octree Meshes

• Authors: Rahul S. Sampath;George Biros
• Venue: SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
• Year: 2010

In this article, we present a parallel geometric multigrid algorithm for solving variable-coefficient elliptic partial differential equations on the unit box (with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions) using highly nonuniform, octree-based, conforming finite element discretizations. Our octrees are 2:1 balanced, that is, we allow no more than one octree-level difference between octants that share a face, edge, or vertex. We describe a parallel algorithm whose input is an arbitrary 2:1 balanced fine-grid octree and whose output is a set of coarser 2:1 balanced octrees that are used in the multigrid scheme. Also, we derive matrix-free schemes for the discretized finite element operators and the intergrid transfer operations. The overall scheme is second-order accurate for sufficiently smooth right-hand sides and material properties; its complexity for nearly uniform trees is $\mathcal{O}(\frac{N}{n_p}\log\frac{N}{n_p})+\mathcal{O}(n_p\log n_p)$, where $N$ is the number of octree nodes and $n_p$ is the number of processors. Our implementation uses the Message Passing Interface standard. We present numerical experiments for the Laplace and Navier (linear elasticity) operators that demonstrate the scalability of our method. Our largest run was a highly nonuniform, 8-billion-unknown, elasticity calculation using 32,000 processors on the Teragrid system, “Ranger,” at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Our implementation is publically available in the Dendro library, which is built on top of the PETSc library from Argonne National Laboratory.