We focus on the study of multigrid methods with aggressive coarsening and polynomial smoothers for the solution of the linear systems corresponding to finite difference/element discretizations of the Laplace equation. Using local Fourier analysis we determine automatically the optimal values for the parameters involved in defining the polynomial smoothers and achieve fast convergence of cycles with aggressive coarsening. We also present numerical tests supporting the theoretical results and the heuristic ideas. The methods we introduce are highly parallelizable and efficient multigrid algorithms on structured and semi-structured grids in two and three spatial dimensions.

In this work, we extend Achi Brandt's notion of textbook multigrid efficiency (TME) to massively parallel algorithms. Using a finite element based geometric multigrid implementation, we recall the classical view on TME with experiments for scalar linear equations with constant and varying coefficients as well as linear systems with saddle-point structure. To extend the idea of TME to the parallel setting, we give a new characterization of a work unit (WU) in an architecture-aware fashion by taking into account performance modeling techniques. We illustrate our newly introduced parallel TME measure by large-scale computations, solving problems with up to 200 billion unknowns on a TOP-10 supercomputer.

Sparse grids have become a versatile tool for a vast range of applications reaching from interpolation and numerical quadrature to data-driven problems and uncertainty quantification. We review four selected real-world applications of sparse grids: financial product pricing with the Black-Scholes model, interactive exploration of simulation data with sparse-grid-based surrogate models, analysis of simulation data through sparse grid data mining methods, and stability investigations of plasma turbulence simulations.

In this paper, we present a local Fourier analysis framework for analyzing the different components within multigrid solvers for edge-based discretizations on triangular grids. The different stencils associated with edges of different orientation in a triangular mesh make this analysis special. The resulting tool is demonstrated for the vector Laplace problem discretized by mimetic finite difference schemes. Results from the local Fourier analysis, as well as experimentally obtained results, are presented to validate the proposed analysis.

In this paper we present a new computationally efficient numerical scheme for the minimizing flow for the computation of the optimal L2 mass transport mapping using the fluid approach. We review the method and discuss its numerical properties. We then derive a new scaleable, efficient discretization and a solution technique for the problem and show that the problem is equivalent to a mixed form formulation of a nonlinear fluid flow in porous media. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a number of numerical experiments.

This paper provides an overview of the main ideas driving the bootstrap algebraic multigrid methodology, including compatible relaxation and algebraic distances for defining effective coarsening strategies, the least squares method for computing accurate prolongation operators and the bootstrap cycles for computing the test vectors that are used in the least squares process. We review some recent research in the development, analysis and application of bootstrap algebraic multigrid and point to open problems in these areas. Results from our previous research as well as some new results for some model diffusion problems with highly oscillatory diffusion coefficient are presented to illustrate the basic components of the BAMG algorithm.

A shifted Laplacian operator is obtained from the Helmholtz operator by adding a complex damping. It serves as a basic tool in the most successful multigrid approach for solving highly indefinite Helmholtz equations — a Shifted Laplacian preconditioner for Krylov-type methods. Such preconditioning significantly accelerates Krylov iterations, much more so than the multigrid based on original Helmholtz equations. In this paper, we compare approximation and relaxation properties of the Helmholtz operator with and without the complex shift, and, based on our observations, propose a new hybrid approach that combines the two. Our analytical conclusions are supported by two-dimensional numerical results.