A Geometric Multigrid Method for Space-Time Finite Element Discretizations of the Navier–Stokes Equations and its Application to 3D Flow Simulation

We present a parallelized geometric multigrid (GMG) method, based on the cell-based Vanka smoother, for higher order space-time finite element methods (STFEM) to the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. The STFEM is implemented as a time marching scheme. The GMG solver is applied as a preconditioner for generalized minimal residual iterations. Its performance properties are demonstrated for 2D and 3D benchmarks of flow around a cylinder. The key ingredients of the GMG approach are the construction of the local Vanka smoother over all degrees of freedom in time of the respective subinterval and its efficient application. For this, data structures that store pre-computed cell inverses of the Jacobian for all hierarchical levels and require only a reasonable amount of memory overhead are generated. The GMG method is built for the deal.II finite element library. The concepts are flexible and can be transferred to similar software platforms.