A Block Jacobi Sweeping Preconditioner for the Helmholtz Equation

Abstract: In recent research, the parallel performances of sweeping-type algorithms for high-frequency time-harmonic wave problems have been improved by departing from standard layer-type domain decomposition and introducing a new sweeping strategy on a checkerboard-type domain decomposition, where sweeps can be performed more flexibly. These sweeps can be done by a certain number of steps, each of which provides the necessary information from subdomains solved at the current iteration to their next neighboring subdomains. Although, subproblems in these subdomains can be solved concurrently at each step, the sequential nature of the process of the sweeping approaches still exists, which limits their potential for parallelization. We propose a block Jacobi sweeping preconditioner, which is an improved variant of sweeping-type preconditioners. The new feature of these improved variants can be interpreted as several partial sweeps, which can be thought of as sweeps that operate on a subset of the subdomains in parallel. We present several two-dimensional finite element results to study and compare the sweeping preconditioner and the block Jacobi sweeping preconditioner.