Local and parallel finite element algorithms based on two-grid discretizations

Abstract

A number of new local and parallel discretization and adaptive nite element algorithms are proposed and analyzed in this paper for elliptic boundary value problems. These algorithms are motivated by the observation that, for a solution to some elliptic problems, low frequency components can be approximated well by a relatively coarse grid and high frequency components can be computed on a ne grid by some local and parallel procedure. The theoretical tools for analyzing these methods are some local a priori and a posteriori estimates that are also obtained in this paper for nite element solutions on general shape-regular grids. Some numerical experiments are also presented to support the theory. In this paper, we will propose some new parallel techniques for nite element computation. These techniques are based on our understanding of the local and global properties of a nite element solution to some elliptic problems. Simply speaking, the global behavior of a solution is mostly governed by low frequency components while the local behavior is mostly governed by high frequency compo- nents. The main idea of our new algorithms is to use a coarse grid to approximate the low frequencies and then to use a ne grid to correct the resulted residue (which contains mostly high frequencies) by some local/parallel procedures. Let us now give a somewhat more detailed but informal (and hopefully infor- mative) description of the main ideas and results in this paper. We consider the following very simple model problem posed on a convex polygonal domain R 2 : ( u + bru = f; in ;