hypre preconditioners

[Klaij, Christiaan]

I'm solving the steady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations (discretized with FV on unstructured grids) using the SIMPLE Pressure Correction method. I'm using Picard linearization and solve the system for the momentum equations with BICG and for the pressure equation with CG. Currently, for parallel runs, I'm using JACOBI as a preconditioner. My grids typically have a few million cells and I use between 4 and 16 cores (1 to 4 quadcore CPUs on a linux cluster). A significant portion of the CPU time goes into solving the pressure equation. To reach the relative tolerance I need, CG with JACOBI takes about 100 iterations per outer loop for these problems.

In order to reduce CPU time, I've compiled PETSc with support for Hypre and I'm looking at BoomerAMG and Euclid to replace JACOBI as a preconditioner for the pressure equation. With default settings, both BoomerAMG and Euclid greatly reduce the number of iterations: with BoomerAMG 1 or 2 iterations are enough, with Euclid about 10. However, I do not get any reduction in CPU time. With Euclid, CPU time is similar to JACOBI and with BoomerAMG it is approximately doubled.

Is this what one can expect? Are BoomerAMG and Euclid meant for much larger problems? I understand Hypre uses a different matrix storage format, is CPU time 'lost in translation' between PETSc and Hypre for these small problems? Are there maybe any settings I should change?

Chris







dr. ir. Christiaan Klaij
CFD Researcher
Research & Development
mailto:C.Klaij at marin.nl
T +31 317 49 33 44

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