Two-level Schwarz methods for a discontinuous Galerkin approximation of elliptic problems with jump coefficients (Q777036)

The authors present two-level Schwarz methods for the iterative solution of the linear system arising from discretizing scalar elliptic equations by a symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretization of degree \(p=1\). The work addresses the case of piecewise constant coefficients on each element of the mesh with arbitrary jumps across elements. The coarse space is derived by solving local generalized eigenvalue problems on each subdomain based on the local Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps. These methods, already in widespread use for continuous finite element discretizations, did not have proper mathematical support for the DG case before the present work. The authors propose a simple-to-implement non-overlapping Schwarz method with high robustness, as well as an overlapping variant similar to [\textit{V. Dolean} et al., Comput. Methods Appl. Math. 12, No. 4, 391--414 (2012; Zbl 1284.65050)] that is more efficient in many cases, but requires an additional assumption on the coefficients. Analysis following the general tools applied in domain decomposition methods proves the optimal conditioning and convergence of the two methods. Numerical tests using coefficients with contrast ratios up to \(10^6\) in two and three dimensions verify the theoretical results and the advantage against classical domain decomposition approaches, achieving iteration counts between 30 and 50 to reduce the residual by \(10^6\) for most cases, irrespective the mesh size and jump in coefficients. Following available software implementations developed for continuous finite element scenarios, efficient hardware-aware parallel implementations can be expected in the future. While the achievable performance of the method will not match the best multigrid methods for discontinuous Galerkin discretizations with simple smoothers when applied to problems with gentle coefficients, the contribution is promising for difficult elliptic problems with high contrast-ratio coefficients due the provable robustness.