High-performance matrix-free unfitted finite element operator evaluation (Q6972303)

The paper deals with the matrix-free computation of the Laplace equation discretized by the unfitted finite element methods. The proposed method loops over cells and locally evaluates the cell, face, and interface integrals, including the contributions from cut cells and the different means of stabilization. The authors present design choices and performance optimizations for tensor-product elements and demonstrate the performance by means of benchmarks and application examples. The detailed numerical study demonstrates the speedup of more than one order of magnitude for the operator evaluation of a discontinuous Galerkin discretization with polynomial degree three compared to a sparse matrix-vector product. Moreover, the authors develop performance models to quantify the performance properties over a wide range of polynomial degrees.