Special issue on multigrid methods

Abstract

The Twelfth Copper Mountain Conference on Multigrid Methods was held amidst the snow-covered Colorado Rocky Mountains, 3 April-8 April, 2005. Ten papers presented at the conference were selected for publication in this special issue. The papers cover a breadth of topics, ranging from theory to high-performance computing. Several of the papers are devoted to new developments in algebraic multigrid (AMG), a method that has seen a resurgence of interest since it was introduced in the early 1980s. More than half of the papers address application topics, furthering the utility of multigrid to an ever-wider class of problems. The First Copper Mountain Conference on Multigrid Methods was organized in 1983 by Steve McCormick, who persevered to chair nine more in this biennial series before handing over the reins in 2003. Today, the conference is widely regarded as one of the premier international conferences on multigrid methods. In 1990, it was joined by the equally-successful conference on iterative methods, chaired by Tom Manteuffel. This year's multigrid meeting was co-chaired by the now two-time veterans Van Henson and Joel Dendy. The conference began with three tutorial sessions given by Van Henson and Jim Jones. The sessions covered multigrid basics as well as more advanced topics such as non-linear multigrid and AMG, and finished with a tutorial on parallel multigrid. The remaining five days of the conference were organized around a series of 30-minute talks, allowing ample time for individual research discussions with colleagues. The student paper competition witnessed one of the best collections of papers in the history of the meeting, and the three winners (Bram Metsch, Haim Waisman, and Michael Bronstein) gave first-rate presentations in the student session. The conference was held in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and sponsored by the Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories, Front Range Scientific Computation, Inc., the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and IBM Corporation. The Program Committee members for this year's conference were Susanne Brenner, Craig Douglas, Robert Falgout, Jim Jones, Kirk Jordan, Tom Manteuffel, Steve McCormick, David Moulton, Kees Oosterlee, Joseph Pasciak, Ulrich Rüde, John Ruge, Klaus Stüben, Panayot Vassilevski, Olof Widlund, and Irad Yavneh. The Program Committee served as Guest Editors for the special issue. We thank the editors of Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications for hosting this special issue, especially Panayot, for his invaluable help and guidance.