arXiv subjects

Shu-Lin Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Shu-Lin Wu.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Time parallelization for hyperbolic and parabolic problems

Time parallelization, also known as PinT (Parallel-in-Time) is a new research direction for the development of algorithms used for solving very large scale evolution problems on highly parallel computing architectures. Despite the fact that interesting theoretical work on PinT appeared as early 1964, it was not until 2004, when processor clock speeds reached their physical limit, that research in PinT took off. A distinctive characteristic of parallelization in time is that information flow only goes forward in time, meaning that time evolution processes seem necessarily to be sequential. Nevertheless, many algorithms have been developed over the last two decades to do PinT computations, and they are often grouped into four basic classes according to how the techniques work and are used: shooting-type methods; waveform relaxation methods based on domain decomposition; multigrid methods in space-time; and direct time parallel methods. However, over the past few years, it has been recognized that highly successful PinT algorithms for parabolic problems struggle when applied to hyperbolic problems. We focus in this survey therefore on this important aspect, by first providing a summary of the fundamental differences between parabolic and hyperbolic problems for time parallelization. We then group PinT algorithms into two basic groups: the first group contains four effective PinT techniques for hyperbolic problems, namely Schwarz Waveform Relaxation with its relation to Tent Pitching; Parallel Integral Deferred Correction; ParaExp; and ParaDiag. While the methods in the first group also work well for parabolic problems, we then present PinT methods especially designed for parabolic problems in the second group: Parareal: the Parallel Full Approximation Scheme in Space-Time; Multigrid Reduction in Time; and Space-Time Multigrid.

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arXiv2023

A preconditioned MINRES method for block lower triangular Toeplitz systems

In this study, a novel preconditioner based on the absolute-value block $\alpha$-circulant matrix approximation is developed, specifically designed for nonsymmetric dense block lower triangular Toeplitz (BLTT) systems that emerge from the numerical discretization of evolutionary equations. Our preconditioner is constructed by taking an absolute-value of a block $\alpha$-circulant matrix approximation to the BLTT matrix. To apply our preconditioner, the original BLTT linear system is converted into a symmetric form by applying a time-reversing permutation transformation. Then, with our preconditioner, the preconditioned minimal residual method (MINRES) solver is employed to solve the symmetrized linear system. With properly chosen $\alpha$, the eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrix are proven to be clustered around $\pm1$ without any significant outliers. With the clustered spectrum, we show that the preconditioned MINRES solver for the preconditioned system has a convergence rate independent of system size. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first preconditioned MINRES method with size-independent convergence rate for the dense BLTT system. The efficacy of the proposed preconditioner is corroborated by our numerical experiments, which reveal that it attains optimal convergence.

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arXiv2023

Parareal algorithm via Chebyshev-Gauss spectral collocation method

We present the Parareal-CG algorithm for time-dependent differential equations in this work. The algorithm is a parallel in time iteration algorithm utilizes Chebyshev-Gauss spectral collocation method for fine propagator F and backward Euler method for coarse propagator G. As far as we know, this is the first time that the spectral method used as the F propagator of the parareal algorithm. By constructing the stable function of the Chebyshev-Gauss spectral collocation method for the symmetric positive definite (SPD) problem, we find out that the Parareal-CG algorithm and the Parareal-TR algorithm, whose F propagator is chosen to be a trapezoidal ruler, converge similarly, i.e., the Parareal-CG algorithm converge as fast as Parareal-Euler algorithm with sufficient Chebyhsev-Gauss points in every coarse grid. Numerical examples including ordinary differential equations and time-dependent partial differential equations are given to illustrate the high efficiency and accuracy of the proposed algorithm.

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arXiv2022

A well-conditioned direct PinT algorithm for first-and second-order evolutionary equations

In this paper, we propose a direct parallel-in-time (PinT) algorithm for time-dependent problems with first- or second-order derivative. We use a second-order boundary value method as the time integrator that leads to a tridiagonal time discretization matrix. Instead of solving the corresponding all-at-once system iteratively, we diagonalize the time discretization matrix, which yields a direct parallel implementation across all time levels. A crucial issue on this methodology is how the condition number of the eigenvector matrix $V$ grows as $n$ is increased, where $n$ is the number of time levels. A large condition number leads to large roundoff error in the diagonalization procedure, which could seriously pollute the numerical accuracy. Based on a novel connection between the characteristic equation and the Chebyshev polynomials, we present explicit formulas for computing $V$ and $V^{-1}$, by which we prove that $\mathrm{Cond}_2(V)=\mathcal{O}(n^{2})$. This implies that the diagonalization process is well-conditioned and the roundoff error only increases moderately as $n$ grows and thus, compared to other direct PinT algorithms, a much larger $n$ can be used to yield satisfactory parallelism. Numerical results on parallel machine are given to support our findings, where over 60 times speedup is achieved with 256 cores.

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arXiv2021

Parallel-in-time preconditioners for the Sinc-Nyström method

The Sinc-Nyström method is a high-order numerical method based on Sinc basis functions for discretizing evolutionary differential equations in time. But in this method we have to solve all the time steps in one-shot (i.e. all-at-once), which results in a large-scale nonsymmetric dense system that is expensive to handle. In this paper, we propose and analyze preconditioner for such dense system arising from both the parabolic and hyperbolic PDEs. The proposed preconditioner is a low-rank perturbation of the original matrix and has two advantages. First, we show that the eigenvalues of the preconditioned system are highly clustered with some uniform bounds which are independent of the mesh parameters. Second, the preconditioner can be used parallel for all the Sinc time points via a block diagonalization procedure. Such a parallel potential owes to the fact that the eigenvector matrix of the diagonalization is well conditioned. In particular, we show that the condition number of the eigenvector matrix only mildly grows as the number of Sinc time points increases, and thus the roundoff error arising from the diagonalization procedure is controllable. The effectiveness of our proposed PinT preconditioners is verified by the observed mesh-independent convergence rates of the preconditioned GMRES in reported numerical examples.

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arXiv2021

A parallel-in-time preconditioner for Crank-Nicolson discretization of a parabolic optimal control problem

In this paper, a fast solver is studied for saddle point system arising from a second-order Crank-Nicolson discretization of an initial-valued parabolic PDE constrained optimal control problem, which is indefinite and ill-conditioned. Different from the saddle point system arising from the first-order Euler discretization, the saddle point system arising from Crank-Nicolson discretization has a dense and non-symmetric Schur complement, which brings challenges to fast solver designing. To remedy this, a novel symmetrization technique is applied to the saddle point system so that the new Schur complement is symmetric definite and the well-known matching-Schur-complement (MSC) preconditioner is applicable to the new Schur complement. Nevertheless, the new Schur complement is still a dense matrix and the inversion of the corresponding MSC preconditioner is not parallel-in-time (PinT) and thus time consuming. For this concern, a modified MSC preconditioner for the new Schur complement system. Our new preconditioner can be implemented in a fast and PinT way via a temporal diagonalization technique. Theoretically, the eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrix by our new preconditioner are proven to be lower and upper bounded by positive constants independent of matrix size and the regularization parameter. With such spectrum, the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) solver for the Schur complement system is proven to have a convergence rate independent of matrix size and regularization parameter. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first time to have an iterative solver with problem-independent convergence rate for the saddle point system arising from Crank-Nicolson discretization of the optimal control problem. Numerical results are reported to show that the performance of the proposed preconditioner.

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arXiv2021

ParaDiag: parallel-in-time algorithms based on the diagonalization technique

In 2008, Maday and Ronquist introduced an interesting new approach for the direct parallel-in-time (PinT) solution of time-dependent PDEs. The idea is to diagonalize the time stepping matrix, keeping the matrices for the space discretization unchanged, and then to solve all time steps in parallel. Since then, several variants appeared, and we call these closely related algorithms ParaDiag algorithms. ParaDiagalgorithms in the literature can be classified into two groups: ParaDiag-I: direct standalone solvers, ParaDiag-II: iterative solvers. We will explain the basic features of each group in this note. To have concrete examples, we will introduce ParaDiag-I and ParaDiag-II for the advection-diffusion equation. We will also introduce ParaDiag-II for the wave equation and an optimal control problem for the wave equation. We could have used the advection-diffusion equation as well to illustrate ParaDiag-II, but wave equations are known to cause problems for certain PinT algorithms and thus constitute an especially interesting example for which ParaDiag algorithms were tested. We show the main known theoretical results in each case, and also provide Matlab codes for testing. The goal of the Matlab codes is to help the interested reader understand the key features of the ParaDiag algorithms, without intention to be highly tuned for efficiency and/or low memory use. We also provide speedup measurements of ParaDiag algorithms for a 2D linear advection-diffusion equation. These results are obtained on the Tianhe-1 supercomputer in China and the SIUE Campus Cluster in the US and and we compare these results to the performance of parareal and MGRiT, two widely used PinT algorithms.

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arXiv2021

Stability implies robust convergence of a class of preconditioned parallel-in-time iterative algorithms

Solving evolutionary equations in a parallel-in-time manner is an attractive topic and many algorithms are proposed in recent two decades. The algorithm based on the block $α$-circulant preconditioning technique has shown promising advantages, especially for wave propagation problems. By fast Fourier transform for factorizing the involved circulant matrices, the preconditioned iteration can be computed efficiently via the so-called diagonalization technique, which yields a direct parallel implementation across all time levels. In recent years, considerable efforts have been devoted to exploring the convergence of the preconditioned iteration by studying the spectral radius of the iteration matrix, and this leads to many case-by-case studies depending on the used time-integrator. In this paper, we propose a unified convergence analysis for the algorithm applied to $u'+Au=f$, where $σ(A)\subset\mathbb{C}^+$ with $σ(A)$ being the spectrum of $A\in\mathbb{C}^{m\times m}$. For any one-step method (such as the Runge-Kutta methods) with stability function $\mathcal{R}(z)$, we prove that the decay rate of the global error is bounded by $α/(1-α)$, provided the method is stable, i.e., $\max_{λ\inσ(A)}|\mathcal{R}(Δtλ)|\leq1$. For any linear multistep method, such a bound becomes $cα/(1-cα)$, where $c\geq1$ is a constant specified by the multistep method itself. Our proof only relies on the stability of the time-integrator and the estimate is independent of the step size $Δt$ and the spectrum $σ(A)$.

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