Section: Research Program

Hybrid time discretizations of high-order

Most of the meshes we consider are composed of cells greatly varying in size. This can be due to the physical characteristics (propagation speed, topography, ...) which may require to refine the mesh locally, very unstructured meshes can also be the result of dysfunction of the mesher. For practical reasons which are essentially guided by the aim of reducing the number of matrix inversions, explicit schemes are generally privileged. However, they work under a stability condition, the so-called Courant Friedrichs Lewy (CFL) condition which forces the time step being proportional to the size of the smallest cell. Then, it is necessary to perform a huge number of iterations in time and in most of the cases because of a very few number of small cells. This implies to apply a very small time step on grids mainly composed of coarse cells and thus, there is a risk of creating numerical dispersion that should not exist. However, this drawback can be avoided by using low degree polynomial basis in space in the small meshes and high degree polynomials in the coarse meshes. By this way, it is possible to relax the CFL condition and in the same time, the dispersion effects are limited. Unfortunately, the cell-size variations are so important that this strategy is not sufficient. One solution could be to apply implicit and unconditionally stable schemes, which would obviously free us from the CFL constraint. Unfortunately, these schemes require inverting a linear system at each iteration and thus needs huge computational burden that can be prohibitive in 3D. Moreover, numerical dispersion may be increased. Then, as second solution is the use of local time stepping strategies for matching the time step to the different sizes of the mesh. There are several attempts  [66], [63], [79], [75], [68] and Magique 3D has proposed a new time stepping method which allows us to adapt both the time step and the order of time approximation to the size of the cells. Nevertheless, despite a very good performance assessment in academic configurations, we have observed to our detriment that its implementation inside industrial codes is not obvious and in practice, improvements of the computational costs are disappointing, especially in a HPC framework. Indeed, the local time stepping algorithm may strongly affect the scalability of the code. Moreover, the complexity of the algorithm is increased when dealing with lossy media  [71].

Recently, Dolean et al  [67] have considered a novel approach consisting in applying hybrid schemes combining second order implicit schemes in the thin cells and second order explicit discretization in the coarse mesh. Their numerical results indicate that this method could be a good alternative but the numerical dispersion is still present. It would then be interesting to implement this idea with high-order time schemes to reduce the numerical dispersion. The recent arrival in the team of J. Chabassier should help us to address this problem since she has the expertise in constructing high-order implicit time scheme based on energy preserving Newmark schemes  [64]. We propose that our work be organized around the two following tasks. The first one is the extension of these schemes to the case of lossy media because applying existing schemes when there is attenuation is not straightforward. This is a key issue because there is artificial attenuation when absorbing boundary conditions are introduced and if not, there are cases with natural attenuation like in visco-elastic media. The second one is the coupling of high-order implicit schemes with high-order explicit schemes. These two tasks can be first completed independently, but the ultimate goal is obviously to couple the schemes for lossy media. We will consider two strategies for the coupling. The first one will be based on the method proposed by Dolean et al, the second one will consist in using Lagrange multiplier on the interface between the coarse and fine grids and write a novel coupling condition that ensures the high order consistency of the global scheme. Besides these theoretical aspects, we will have to implement the method in industrial codes and our discretization methodology is very suitable for parallel computing since it involves Lagrange multipliers. We propose to organize this task as follows. There is first the crucial issue of a systematic distribution of the cells in the coarse/explicit and in the fine/implicit part. Based on our experience on local time stepping, we claim that it is necessary to define a criterion which discriminates thin cells from coarse ones. Indeed, we intend to develop codes which will be used by practitioners, in particular engineers working in the production department of Total. It implies that the code will be used by people who are not necessarily experts in scientific computing. Considering real-world problems means that the mesh will most probably be composed of a more or less high number of subsets arbitrarily distributed and containing thin or coarse cells. Moreover, in the prospect of solving inverse problems, it is difficult to assess which cells are thin or not in a mesh which varies at each iteration.

Another important issue is the load balancing that we can not avoid with parallel computing. In particular, we will have to choose one of these two alternatives: dedicate one part of processors to the implicit computations and the other one to explicit calculus or distribute the resolution with both schemes on all processors. A collaboration with experts in HPC is then mandatory since we are not expert in parallel computing. We will thus continue to collaborate with the team-projects Hiepacs and Runtime with whom we have a long-term experience of collaborations. The load-balancing leads then to the issue of mesh partitioning. Main mesh partitioners are very efficient for the coupling of different discretizations in space but to the best of our knowledge, the case of non-uniform time discretization has never been addressed. The study of meshes being out of the scopes of Magique-3D, we will collaborate with experts on mesh partitioning. We get already on to François Pellegrini who is the principal investigator of Scotch (http://www.labri.fr/perso/pelegrin/scotch) and permanent member of the team project Bacchus (Inria Bordeaux Sud Ouest Research Center).

In the future, we aim at enlarging the application range of implicit schemes. The idea will be to use the degrees of freedom offered by the implicit discretization in order to tackle specific difficulties that may appear in some systems. For instance, in systems involving several waves (as P and S waves in porous elastic media, or coupled wave problems as previously mentioned) the implicit parameter could be adapted to each wave and optimized in order to reduce the computational cost. More generally, we aim at reducing numeric bottlenecks by adapting the implicit discretization to specific cases.