The method of polarized traces for the 2D Helmholtz equation

TL;DR

The paper introduces a parallel, domain-decomposition solver for the 2D high-frequency Helmholtz equation that efficiently handles heterogeneous media using polarized traces and low-rank approximations, achieving optimal complexity.

Contribution

It develops a novel polarized traces method with parallel scalability and low-rank compression for solving high-frequency Helmholtz problems in heterogeneous media.

Findings

Achieves optimal parallel complexity of O(N/L)

Converges in 5 to 10 GMRES iterations on standard models

Uses adaptive low-rank partitioning to accelerate computations

Abstract

We present a solver for the 2D high-frequency Helmholtz equation in heterogeneous acoustic media, with online parallel complexity that scales optimally as $\mathcal{O}(\frac{N}{L})$, where $N$ is the number of volume unknowns, and $L$ is the number of processors, as long as $L$ grows at most like a small fractional power of $N$. The solver decomposes the domain into layers, and uses transmission conditions in boundary integral form to explicitly define "polarized traces", i.e., up- and down-going waves sampled at interfaces. Local direct solvers are used in each layer to precompute traces of local Green's functions in an embarrassingly parallel way (the offline part), and incomplete Green's formulas are used to propagate interface data in a sweeping fashion, as a preconditioner inside a GMRES loop (the online part). Adaptive low-rank partitioning of the integral kernels is used to speed up their application to interface data. The method uses second-order finite differences. The complexity scalings are empirical but motivated by an analysis of ranks of off-diagonal blocks of oscillatory integrals. They continue to hold in the context of standard geophysical community models such as BP and Marmousi 2, where convergence occurs in 5 to 10 GMRES iterations.