Spectral Coarse Spaces for the Substructured Parallel Schwarz Method

The parallel Schwarz method (PSM) is an overlapping domain decomposition (DD) method to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Similarly to classical nonoverlapping DD methods, the PSM admits a substructured formulation, that is, it can be formulated as an iteration acting on variables defined exclusively on the interfaces of the overlapping decomposition. In this manuscript, spectral coarse spaces are considered to improve the convergence and robustness of the substructured PSM. In this framework, the coarse space functions are defined exclusively on the interfaces. This is in contrast to classical two-level volume methods, where the coarse functions are defined in volume, though with local support. The approach presented in this work has several advantages. First, it allows one to use some of the well-known efficient coarse spaces proposed in the literature, and facilitates the numerical construction of efficient coarse spaces. Second, the computational work is comparable or lower than standard volume two-level methods. Third, it opens new interesting perspectives as the analysis of the new two-level substructured method requires the development of a new convergence analysis of general two-level iterative methods. The new analysis casts light on the optimality of coarse spaces: given a fixed dimension m, the spectral coarse space made by the first m dominant eigenvectors is not necessarily the minimizer of the asymptotic convergence factor. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed new numerical framework.