Deflation-accelerated preconditioning of the Poisson-Neumann Schur problem on long domains with a high-order discontinuous element-based collocation method

Abstract: A combination of block-Jacobi and deflation preconditioning is used to solve a high-order discontinuous collocation-based discretization of the Schur complement of the Poisson-Neumann system as arises in the operator splitting of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The preconditioners and deflation vectors are chosen to mitigate the effects of ill-conditioning due to highly-elongated domains and to achieve GMRES convergence independent of the size of the grid. The ill-posedness of the Poisson-Neumann system manifests as an inconsistency of the Schur complement problem, but it is shown that this can be accounted for with appropriate projections out of the null space of the Schur matrix without affecting the accuracy of the solution. The combined deflation/block-Jacobi preconditioning is compared with two-level non-overlapping additive Schwarz preconditioning of the Schur problem, and while both methods achieve convergence independent of the grid size, deflation is shown to require half as many GMRES iterations and $25\%$ less wall-clock time for a variety of grid sizes and domain aspect ratios. The deflation methods shown to be effective for the two-dimensional Poisson-Neumann problem are extensible to the three-dimensional problem assuming a Fourier discretization in the third dimension.