Robust smoothers for high-order discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of advection–diffusion problems

The multigrid method for discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretizations of advection–diffusion problems is presented. It is based on a block Gauss–Seidel smoother with downwind ordering honoring the advection operator. The cell matrices of the DG scheme are inverted in this smoother in order to obtain robustness for higher order elements. Employing a set of experiments, we show that this technique actually yields an efficient preconditioner and that both ingredients, downwind ordering and blocking of cell matrices are crucial for robustness.