Analysis of Schwarz Methods for a Hybridizable Discontinuous Galerkin Discretization

Schwarz methods are attractive parallel solvers for large-scale linear systems obtained when partial differential equations are discretized. For hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) methods, this is a relatively new field of research, because HDG methods impose continuity across elements using a Robin condition, while classical Schwarz solvers use Dirichlet transmission conditions. Robin conditions are used in optimized Schwarz methods to get faster convergence compared to classical Schwarz methods, and this even without overlap, when the Robin parameter is well chosen. We present in this paper a rigorous convergence analysis of Schwarz methods for the concrete case of the hybridizable interior penalty (IPH) method. We show that the penalization parameter needed for convergence of IPH leads to slow convergence of the classical additive Schwarz method, and we propose a modified solver which leads to much faster convergence. Our analysis is entirely at the discrete level and thus holds for arbitrary interfaces between two subdomains. We then generalize the method to the case of many subdomains, including cross-points, and obtain a new class of preconditioners for Krylov subspace methods which exhibit better convergence properties than the classical additive Schwarz preconditioner. We illustrate our results with numerical experiments.