A Simple and Efficient Segregated Smoother for the Discrete Stokes Equations

Abstract

We consider the multigrid solution of the generalized Stokes equations with a segregated (i.e., equationwise) Gauss--Seidel smoother based on a Uzawa-type iteration. We analyze the smoother in the framework of local Fourier analysis, and obtain an analytic bound on the smoothing factor showing uniform performance for a family of Stokes problems. These results are confirmed by the numerical computation of the two-grid convergence factor for different types of grids and discretizations. Numerical results also show that the actual convergence of the W-cycle is approximately the same as that obtained by a Vanka smoother, despite this latter smoother being significantly more costly per iteration step.