Explicit stabilized multirate method for stiff stochastic differential equations

Abstract: Stabilized explicit methods are particularly efficient for large systems of stiff stochastic differential equations (SDEs) due to their extended stability domain. However, they loose their efficiency when a severe stiffness is induced by very few "fast" degrees of freedom, as the stiff and nonstiff terms are evaluated concurrently. Therefore, inspired by [A. Abdulle, M. J. Grote, and G. Rosilho de Souza, Preprint (2020), arXiv:2006.00744] we introduce a stochastic modified equation whose stiffness depends solely on the "slow" terms. By integrating this modified equation with a stabilized explicit scheme we devise a multirate method which overcomes the bottleneck caused by a few severely stiff terms and recovers the efficiency of stabilized schemes for large systems of nonlinear SDEs. The scheme is not based on any scale separation assumption of the SDE and therefore it is employable for problems stemming from the spatial discretization of stochastic parabolic partial differential equations on locally refined grids. The multirate scheme has strong order 1/2, weak order 1 and its stability is proved on a model problem. Numerical experiments confirm the efficiency and accuracy of the scheme.