Efficient preconditioning for the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method by low-order elements (Q1030663)

The authors describe another preconditioning approach that is related to the decomposition method; the iterative solver is constructed by substructuring, where the splitting of the finite element space is based on decomposing internal and external degrees of freedom on each element, which is possible for specific sets of basis functions like e. g. hierarchical basis functions. This is the well known technique of the finite element method. The goal of this article is to generalize this technique for the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (dGFEM). The authors introduce a specific block preconditioning approach and prove that the condition number of the preconditioned system is uniformly bounded with respect of the mesh size of triangulation. The estimate is also explicit with respect to the polynomial degree \(p\) and it is shown that the bound grows as \( p^{2}\left( 1+\ln p\right) ^{2}.\) This result is less favorable than the corresponding one for the conforming finite element method. Therefore the preconditioning technique remains limited to the dGFEM discretization where the polynomial degree is chosen to be relatively small. Numerical experiments demonstrate the performance of the method.