this paper is to highlight some of the underlying driving analytical mechanisms. The price of a powerful tool is the effort to construct and understand it. Its successful application hinges on the realization of a number of requirements. Some space has to be reserved for a clear identification of these requirements as well as for their realization. This is also particularly important for understanding the severe obstructions, that keep us at present from readily materializing all the principally promising perspectives.

Numerical experiments have shown that two-level Schwarz methods often perform very well even if the overlap between neighboring subregions is quite small. This is true to an even greater extent for a related algorithm, due to Barry Smith, where a Schwarz algorithm is applied to the reduced linear system of equations that remains after that the variables interior to the subregions have been eliminated. In this paper, a supporting theory is developed.

. Several domain decomposition methods of Neumann-Neumann type are considered for solving the large linear systems of algebraic equations that arise from discretizations of elliptic problems by finite elements. We will only consider problems in three dimensions. Several new variants of the basic algorithm are introduced in a Schwarz method framework that provides tools which have already proven very useful in the design and analysis of other domain decomposition and multi-level methods. The Neumann-Neumann algorithms have several advantages over other domain decomposition methods. The subregions, which define the subproblems, only share the boundary degrees of freedom with their neighbors. The subregions can also be of quite arbitrary shape and many of the major components of the preconditioner can be constructed from subprograms available in standard finite element program libraries. However, in its original form, the algorithm lacks a mechanism for global transportation of informatio...

this article, we emphasize practical issues; an earlier survey by Bern and Eppstein [24] emphasized theoretical results. Although there is inevitably some overlap between these two surveys, we intend them to be complementary.

. We consider two level overlapping Schwarz domain decomposition methods for solving the finite element problems that arise from discretizations of elliptic problems on general unstructured meshes in two and three dimensions. Standard finite element interpolation from the coarse to the fine grid may be used. Our theory requires no assumption on the substructures which constitute the whole domain, so each substructure can be of arbitrary shape and of different size. The global coarse mesh is allowed to be non-nested to the fine grid on which the discrete problem is to be solved and both the coarse meshes and the fine meshes need not be quasi-uniform. In addition, the domains defined by the fine and coarse grid need not be identical. The one important constraint is that the closure of the coarse grid must cover any portion of the fine grid boundary for which Neumann boundary conditions are given. In this general setting, our algorithms have the same optimal convergence rate of the usual ...

ABSTRACT. Adaptive multilevel finite element methods are developed and analyzed for certain elliptic systems arising in geometric analysis and general relativity. This class of nonlinear elliptic systems of tensor equations on manifolds is first reviewed, and then adaptive multilevel finite element methods for approximating solutions to this class of problems are considered in some detail. Two a posteriori error indicators are derived, based on local residuals and on global linearized adjoint or dual problems. The design of Manifold Code (MC) is then discussed; MC is an adaptive multilevel finite element software package for 2- and 3-manifolds developed over several years at Caltech and UC San Diego. It employs a posteriori error estimation, adaptive simplex subdivision, unstructured algebraic multilevel methods, global inexact Newton methods, and numerical continuation methods for the numerical solution of nonlinear covariant elliptic systems on 2- and 3-manifolds. Some of the more interesting features of MC are described in detail, including some new ideas for topology and geometry representation in simplex meshes, and an unusual partition of unity-based method for exploiting parallel computers. A short example is then given which involves the Hamiltonian and momentum constraints in the Einstein equations, a representative nonlinear 4-component covariant elliptic system on a Riemannian 3-manifold which arises in general relativity. A number of operator properties and solvability results recently established are first summarized, making possible two quasi-optimal a priori error estimates for Galerkin approximations which are then derived. These two results complete the theoretical framework for effective use of adaptive multilevel finite element methods. A sample calculation using the MC software is then presented.

We present a new approach to the use of parallel computers with adaptive finite element methods. This approach addresses the load balancing problem in a new way, requiring far less communication than current approaches. It also allows existing sequential adaptive PDE codes such as PLTMG and MC to run in a parallel environment without a large investment in recoding. In this new approach, the load balancing problem is reduced to the numerical solution of a small elliptic problem on a single processor, using a sequential adaptive solver, without requiring any modifications to the sequential solver. The small elliptic problem is used to produce a posteriori error estimates to predict future element densities in the mesh, which are then used in a weighted recursive spectral bisection of the initial mesh. The bulk of the calculation then takes place independently on each processor, with no communication, using possibly the same sequential adaptive solver. Each processor adapts its region of the mesh independently, and a nearly load-balanced mesh distribution is usually obtained as a result of the initial weighted spectral bisection. Only the initial fan-out of the mesh decomposition to the processors requires communication. Two additional steps requiring boundary exchange communication may be employed after the individual processors reach an adapted solution, namely, the construction of a global conforming mesh from the independent subproblems, followed by a final smoothing phase using the subdomain solutions as an initial guess. We present a series of convincing numerical experiments that illustrate the e#ectiveness of this approach. The justification of the initial refinement prediction step, as well as the justification of skipping the two communication-intensive steps, ...

. For the representation of piecewise d-linear functions, instead of the usual finite element basis, we introduce a generating system that contains the nodal basis functions of the finest level and of all coarser levels of discretization. This approach enables us to work directly with multilevel decompositions of a function. For a partial differential equation, the Galerkin scheme based on this generating system results in a semidefinite matrix equation that has in the 1D case only about twice, in the 2D case about 4/3 times, and in the 3D case about 8/7 times, as many unknowns as the usual system. Furthermore, the semidefinite system possesses not just one, but many solutions. However, the unique solution of the usual definite finite element problem can be easily computed from every solution of the semidefinite problem. We show that modern multilevel algorithms can be considered as standard iterative methods over the semidefinite system. The conjugate gradient method (CG) for the semi...

Abstract. Two-level additive Schwarz preconditioners are developed for the nonconforming P1 finite element approximation of scalar second-order symmetric positive definite elliptic boundary value problems, the Morley finite element approximation of the biharmonic equation, and the divergence-free nonconforming P1 finite element approximation of the stationary Stokes equations. The condition numbers of the preconditioned systems are shown to be bounded independent of mesh sizes and the number of subdomains in the case of generous overlap. 1.

Using new methods for the parallel solution of elliptic partial di#erential equations, the teraflops computing power of massively parallel computers can be leveraged to perform electrostatic calculations on large biological systems. This paper describes the adaptive multilevel finite element solution of the Poisson-Boltzmann equation for a microtubule on the NPACI IBM Blue Horizon supercomputer. The microtubule system is 40 nm in length and 24 nm in diameter, consists of roughly 600,000 atoms, and has a net charge of-1800 e. Poisson-Boltzmann calculations are performed for several processor configurations and the algorithm shows excellent parallel scaling.