An Agglomeration Multigrid Method for Unstructured Grids

A new agglomeration multigrid method is proposed in this paper for general unstructured grids. By a proper local agglomeration of finite elements, a nested sequence of finite dimensional subspaces are obtained by taking appropriate linear combinations of the basis functions from previous level of space. Our algorithm seems to be able to solve, for example, the Poisson equation discretized on any shape-regular finite element grids with nearly optimal complexity. In this paper, we discuss a multilevel method applied to problems on general unstructured grids. We will describe an approach for designing a multilevel method for the solution of large systems of linear algebraic equations, arising from finite element discretizations on unstructured grids. Our interest will be focused on the performance of an agglomeration multigrid method for unstructured grids. One approach of constructing coarse spaces is based on generating node-nested coarse grids, which are created by selecting subsets of a vertex set, retriangulating the subset, and using piecewise linear interpolation between the grids (see [8, 5]). This still provides an automatic way of generating coarse grids and faster implementations of the interpolation in O(n) time. The drawback is that in three dimensions, retetrahedralization can be problematic. Another effective coarsening strategy has been proposed by Bank and Xu [1]. It uses the geometrical coordinates of the fine grid and the derefinement algorithm is based on the specified patterns of fine grid elements. The interpolation between grids is done by interpolating each fine grid node using only 2 coarse grid nodes. As a consequence of that the fill-in in the coarse grid matrices is reasonably small. The hierarchy of spaces is defined by interpolating the basis. Recently a new approach, known as auxiliary space method, was proposed by Xu [16]. In this method only one non-nested (auxiliary) grid is created and then all consecutive grids are nested. This can be done by using as auxiliary grid a uniform