Space-Time Balancing Domain Decomposition

Abstract

In this work, we propose two-level space-time domain decomposition preconditioners for parabolic problems discretized using finite elements. They are motivated as an extension to space-time of balancing domain decomposition by constraints preconditioners. The key ingredients to be defined are the subassembled space and operator, the coarse degrees of freedom (DOFs) in which we want to enforce continuity among subdomains at the preconditioner level, and the transfer operator from the subassembled to the original finite element space. With regard to the subassembled operator, a perturbation of the time derivative is needed to end up with a well-posed preconditioner. The set of coarse DOFs includes the time average (at the space-time subdomain) of classical space constraints plus new constraints between consecutive subdomains in time. Numerical experiments show that the proposed schemes are weakly scalable in time, i.e., we can efficiently exploit increasing computational resources to solve more time steps i...