Section: Research Program

Solvers for numerical linear algebra

Iterative methods are widely used in industrial applications, and preconditioning is the most important research subject here. Our research considers domain decomposition methods and iterative methods and its goal is to develop solvers that are suitable for parallelism and that exploit the fact that the matrices are arising from the discretization of a system of PDEs on unstructured grids.

One of the main challenges that we address is the lack of robustness and scalability of existing methods as incomplete LU factorizations or Schwarz-based approaches, for which the number of iterations increases significantly with the problem size or with the number of processors. This is often due to the presence of several low frequency modes that hinder the convergence of the iterative method. To address this problem, we study different approaches for dealing with the low frequency modes as coarse space correction in domain decomposition or deflation techniques.

We also focus on developing boundary integral equation methods that would be adapted to the simulation of wave propagation in complex physical situations, and that would lend themselves to the use of parallel architectures. The final objective is to bring the state of the art on boundary integral equations closer to contemporary industrial needs. From this perspective, we investigate domain decomposition strategies in conjunction with boundary element method as well as acceleration techniques (H-matrices, FMM and the like) that would appear relevant in multi-material and/or multi-domain configurations. Our work on this topic also includes numerical implementation on large scale problems, which appears as a challenge due to the peculiarities of boundary integral equations.