Deflation-accelerated preconditioning of the Poisson–Neumann Schur problem on long domains with a high-order discontinuous element-based collocation method

A combination of block-Jacobi and deflation preconditioning is used to solve a high-order discontinuous element-based collocation discretization of the Schur complement of the Poisson–Neumann system as arises in the operator splitting of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. The preconditioners and deflation vectors are chosen to mitigate the effects of ill-conditioning due to highly-elongated domains typical of simulations of strongly non-hydrostatic environmental flows, and to achieve Generalized Minimum RESidual method (GMRES) convergence independent of the size of the number of elements in the long direction. The ill-posedness of the Poisson–Neumann system manifests as an inconsistency of the Schur complement problem, but it is shown that this can be accounted for with appropriate projections out of the null space of the Schur complement matrix without affecting the accuracy of the solution. The block-Jacobi preconditioner is shown to yield GMRES convergence independent of the polynomial order and only weakly dependent on the number of elements within a subdomain in the decomposition. The combined deflation and block-Jacobi preconditioning is compared with two-level non-overlapping block-Jacobi preconditioning of the Schur problem, and while both methods achieve convergence independent of the grid size, deflation is shown to require half as many GMRES iterations and 25%25% less wall-clock time for a variety of grid sizes and domain aspect ratios. The deflation methods shown to be effective for the two-dimensional Poisson–Neumann problem are extensible to the three-dimensional problem assuming a Fourier discretization in the third dimension. A Fourier discretization results in a two-dimensional Helmholtz problem for each Fourier component that is solved using deflated block-Jacobi preconditioning on its Schur complement. Here again deflation is shown to be superior to two-level non-overlapping block-Jacobi preconditioning, requiring about half as many GMRES iterations and 15%15% less time.