Space-filling curves for 2-simplicial meshes created with bisections and reflections

Numerical experiments in J. Maubach: Local bisection refinement and optimal order algebraic multilevel preconditioners, PRISM-97 conference Proceedings, 1977, 121–136 indicated that the refinement with the use of local bisections presented in J. Maubach: Local bisection refinement for n-simplicial grids generated by reflections, SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 16 (1995), 210–227 leads to highly locally refined computational 2-meshes which can be very efficiently load-balanced with the use of a space-filling curve. This paper introduces the construction of this curve which can be produced at almost no costs, proofs that all its properties are invariant under local bisection, and comments on the 3-dimensional case.With the use of a space-filling curve (which passes through all triangular elements), load balancing over several processors is trivial: The load can be distributed over N processors by cutting the curve into N almost equilength parts. Each processor then operates on the triangles which are passed by its part of the curve.     

Local refinement techniques for elliptic problems on cell-centered grids

Summary Algebraic multilevel analogues of the BEPS preconditioner designed for solving discrete elliptic problems on grids with local refinement are formulated, and bounds on their relative condition numbers, with respect to the composite-grid matrix, are derived. TheV-cycle and, more generally,v-foldV-cycle multilevel BEPS preconditioners are presented and studied. It is proved that for 2-D problems theV-cycle multilevel BEPS is almost optimal, whereas thev-foldV-cycle algebraic multilevel BEPS is optimal under a mild restriction on the composite cell-centered grid. For thev-fold multilevel BEPS, the variational relation between the finite difference matrix and the corresponding matrix on the next-coarser level is not necessarily required. Since they are purely algebraically derived, thev-fold (v>1) multilevel BEPS preconditioners perform without any restrictionson the shape of subregions, unless the refinement is too fast. For theV-cycle BEPS preconditioner (2-D problem), a variational relation between the matrices on two consecutive grids is required, but there is no restriction on the method of refinement on the shape, or on the size of the subdomains.     

A Concentration‐Collapse Decomposition for L2 Flow Singularities

We exhibit a concentration‐collapse decomposition of singularities of fourth‐order curvature flows, including the L² curvature flow and Calabi flow, in dimensions n ≤ 4. The proof requires the development of several new a priori estimates. First, we develop a smoothing result for initial metrics with small energy and a volume growth lower bound, in the vein of Perelman's pseudo locality result. Next, we generalize our technique from prior work to exhibit local smoothing estimates for the L² flow in the presence of a curvature‐related bound. A final key ingredient is a new local ?‐regularity result for L² critical metrics with possibly nonconstant scalar curvature. Applications of these results include new compactness and diffeomorphism‐finiteness theorems for smooth compact 4‐manifolds satisfying the necessary and effectively minimal hypotheses of L² curvature pinching and a volume‐noncollapsing condition. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A convergence theory of multilevel additive Schwarz methods on unstructured meshes

We develop a convergence theory for two level and multilevel additive Schwarz domain decomposition methods for elliptic and parabolic problems on general unstructured meshes in two and three dimensions. The coarse and fine grids are assumed only to be shape regular, and the domains formed by the coarse and fine grids need not be identical. In this general setting, our convergence theory leads to completely local bounds for the condition numbers of two level additive Schwarz methods, which imply that these condition numbers are optimal, or independent of fine and coarse mesh sizes and subdomain sizes if the overlap amount of a subdomain with its neighbors varies proportionally to the subdomain size. In particular, we will show that additive Schwarz algorithms are still very efficient for nonselfadjoint parabolic problems with only symmetric, positive definite solvers both for local subproblems and for the global coarse problem. These conclusions for elliptic and parabolic problems improve our earlier results in [12, 15, 16]. Finally, the convergence theory is applied to multilevel additive Schwarz algorithms. Under some very weak assumptions on the fine mesh and coarser meshes, e.g., no requirements on the relation between neighboring coarse level meshes, we are able to derive a condition number bound of the orderO(² L ²), where = max₁lL(h _l +_l– 1)/ _l,h _l is the element size of thelth level mesh, _l the overlap of subdomains on thelth level mesh, andL the number of mesh levels.The work was partially supported by the NSF under contract ASC 92-01266, and ONR under contract ONR-N00014-92-J-1890. The second author was also partially supported by HKRGC grants no. CUHK 316/94E and the Direct Grant of CUHK.     

The cascadic multigrid method for elliptic problems

Summary. The paper deals with certain adaptive multilevel methods at the confluence of nested multigrid methods and iterative methods based on the cascade principle of [10]. From the multigrid point of view, no correction cycles are needed; from the cascade principle view, a basic iteration method without any preconditioner is used at successive refinement levels. For a prescribed error tolerance on the final level, more iterations must be spent on coarser grids in order to allow for less iterations on finer grids. A first candidate of such a cascadic multigrid method was the recently suggested cascadic conjugate gradient method of [9], in short CCG method, whichused the CG method as basic iteration method on each level. In [18] it has been proven, that the CCG method is accurate with optimal complexity for elliptic problems in 2D and quasi-uniform triangulations. The present paper simplifies that theory and extends it to more general basic iteration methods like the traditional multigrid smoothers. Moreover, an adaptive control strategy for the number of iterations on successive refinement levels for possibly highly non-uniform grids is worked out on the basis of a posteriori estimates. Numerical tests confirm the efficiency and robustness of the cascadic multigrid method. Received November 12, 1994 / Revised version received October 12, 1995     

A new look at smoothing Newton methods for nonlinear complementarity problems and box constrained variational inequalities

In this paper we take a new look at smoothing Newton methods for solving the nonlinear complementarity problem (NCP) and the box constrained variational inequalities (BVI). Instead of using an infinite sequence of smoothing approximation functions, we use a single smoothing approximation function and Robinson’s normal equation to reformulate NCP and BVI as an equivalent nonsmooth equation H(u,x)=0, where H:ℜ ²ⁿ →ℜ ²ⁿ , u∈ℜ ⁿ is a parameter variable and x∈ℜ ⁿ is the original variable. The central idea of our smoothing Newton methods is that we construct a sequence {z ^k =(u ^k ,x ^k )} such that the mapping H(·) is continuously differentiable at each z ^k and may be non-differentiable at the limiting point of {z ^k }. We prove that three most often used Gabriel-Moré smoothing functions can generate strongly semismooth functions, which play a fundamental role in establishing superlinear and quadratic convergence of our new smoothing Newton methods. We do not require any function value of F or its derivative value outside the feasible region while at each step we only solve a linear system of equations and if we choose a certain smoothing function only a reduced form needs to be solved. Preliminary numerical results show that the proposed methods for particularly chosen smoothing functions are very promising. Received June 23, 1997 / Revised version received July 29, 1999?Published online December 15, 1999     

Greedy maximum-clique decompositions

A greedy clique decomposition of a graph is obtained by removing maximal cliques from a graph one by one until the graph is empty. We have recently shown that any greedy clique decomposition of a graph of ordern has at mostn ²/4 cliques. A greedy max-clique decomposition is a particular kind cf greedy clique decomposition where maximum cliques are removed, instead of just maximal ones. In this paper, we show that any greedy max-clique decompositionC of a graph of ordern has, wheren(C) is the number of vertices inC.     

Local and parallel finite element method for solving the biharmonic eigenvalue problem of plate vibration

In this paper, we establish a new local and parallel finite element discrete scheme based on the shifted‐inverse power method for solving the biharmonic eigenvalue problem of plate vibration. We prove the local error estimation of finite element solution for the biharmonic equation/eigenvalue problem and prove the error estimation of approximate solution obtained by the local and parallel scheme. When the diameters of three grids satisfy H⁴ = ?(w²) = ?(h), the approximate solutions obtained by our schemes can achieve the asymptotically optimal accuracy. The numerical experiments show that the computational schemes proposed in this paper are effective to solve the biharmonic eigenvalue problem of plate vibration.     

On the convergence of nonnested multigrid methods with nested spaces on coarse grids

Multigrid methods for discretized partial differential problems using nonnested conforming and nonconforming finite elements are here defined in the general setting. The coarse‐grid corrections of these multigrid methods make use of different finite element spaces from those on the finest grid. In general, the finite element spaces on the finest grid are nonnested, while the spaces are nested on the coarse grids. An abstract convergence theory is developed for these multigrid methods for differential problems without full elliptic regularity. This theory applies to multigrid methods of nonnested conforming and nonconforming finite elements with the coarse‐grid corrections established on nested conforming finite element spaces. Uniform convergence rates (independent of the number of grid levels) are obtained for both the V and W‐cycle methods with one smoothing on all coarse grids and with a sufficiently large number of smoothings solely on the finest grid. In some cases, these uniform rates are attained even with one smoothing on all grids. The present theory also applies to multigrid methods for discretized partial differential problems using mixed finite element methods. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 16: 265–284, 2000     

Bisecton by Global Optimization Revisited

In partitioning methods such as branch and bound for solving global optimization problems, the so-called bisection of simplices and hyperrectangles is used since almost 40 years. Bisections are also of interest in finite-element methods. However, as far as we know, no proof has been given of the optimality of bisections with respect to other partitioning strategies. In this paper, after generalizing the current definition of partition slightly, we show that bisection is not optimal. Hybrid approaches combining different subdivision strategies with inner and outer approximation techniques can be more efficient. Even partitioning a polytope into simplices has important applications, for example in computational convexity, when one wants to find the inequality representation of a polytope with known vertices. Furthermore, a natural approach to the computation of the volume of a polytope P is to generate a simplex partition of P, since the volume of a simplex is given by a simple formula. We propose several variants of the partitioning rules and present complexity considerations. Finally, we discuss an approach for the volume computation of so-called H-polytopes, i.e., polytopes given by a system of affine inequalities. Upper bounds for the number of iterations are presented and advantages as well as drawbacks are discussed.     

Commuting projections on graphs

Motivated by the increasing importance of large‐scale networks typically modeled by graphs, this paper is concerned with the development of mathematical tools for solving problems associated with the popular graph Laplacian. We exploit its mixed formulation based on its natural factorization as product of two operators. The goal is to construct a coarse version of the mixed graph Laplacian operator with the purpose to construct two‐level, and by recursion, a multilevel hierarchy of graphs and associated operators. In many situations in practice, having a coarse (i.e., reduced dimension) model that maintains some inherent features of the original large‐scale graph and respective graph Laplacian offers potential to develop efficient algorithms to analyze the underlined network modeled by this large‐scale graph. One possible application of such a hierarchy is to develop multilevel methods that have the potential to be of optimal complexity. In this paper, we consider general (connected) graphs and function spaces defined on its edges and its vertices. These two spaces are related by a discrete gradient operator, ‘Grad’ and its adjoint, ‘ ? Div’, referred to as (negative) discrete divergence. We also consider a coarse graph obtained by aggregation of vertices of the original one. Then, a coarse vertex space is identified with the subspace of piecewise constant functions over the aggregates. We consider the ?₂‐projection Q_H onto the space of these piecewise constants. In the present paper, our main result is the construction of a projection π_H from the original edge‐space onto a properly constructed coarse edge‐space associated with the edges of the coarse graph. The projections π_H and Q_H commute with the discrete divergence operator, that is, we have Div π_H = Q_H div. The respective pair of coarse edge‐space and coarse vertex‐space offer the potential to construct two‐level, and by recursion, multilevel methods for the mixed formulation of the graph Laplacian, which utilizes the discrete divergence operator. The performance of one two‐level method with overlapping Schwarz smoothing and correction based on the constructed coarse spaces for solving such mixed graph Laplacian systems is illustrated on a number of graph examples. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Structure Theorem for Strong Immersions

A graph H is strongly immersed in G if H is obtained from G by a sequence of vertex splittings (i.e., lifting some pairs of incident edges and removing the vertex) and edge removals. Equivalently, vertices of H are mapped to distinct vertices of G (branch vertices) and edges of H are mapped to pairwise edge‐disjoint paths in G, each of them joining the branch vertices corresponding to the ends of the edge and not containing any other branch vertices. We describe the structure of graphs avoiding a fixed graph as a strong immersion. The theorem roughly states that a graph which excludes a fixed graph as a strong immersion has a tree‐like decomposition into pieces glued together on small edge cuts such that each piece of the decomposition has a path‐like linear decomposition isolating the high degree vertices.     

Stable enrichment and local preconditioning in the particle-partition of unity method

This paper is concerned with the stability and approximation properties of enriched meshfree and generalized finite element methods. In particular we focus on the particle-partition of unity method (PPUM) yet the presented results hold for any partition of unity based enrichment scheme. The goal of our enrichment scheme is to recover the optimal convergence rate of the uniform h-version independent of the regularity of the solution. Hence, we employ enrichment not only for modeling purposes but rather to improve the approximation properties of the numerical scheme. To this end we enrich our PPUM function space in an enrichment zone hierarchically near the singularities of the solution. This initial enrichment however can lead to a severe ill-conditioning and can compromise the stability of the discretization. To overcome the ill-conditioning of the enriched shape functions we present an appropriate local preconditioner which yields a stable and well-conditioned basis independent of the employed initial enrichment. The construction of this preconditioner is of linear complexity with respect to the number of discretization points. We obtain optimal error bounds for an enriched PPUM discretization with local preconditioning that are independent of the regularity of the solution globally and within the employed enrichment zone we observe a kind of super-convergence. The results of our numerical experiments clearly show that our enriched PPUM with local preconditioning recovers the optimal convergence rate of O(h ^p ) of the uniform h-version globally. For the considered model problems from linear elastic fracture mechanics we obtain an improved convergence rate of O(h ^p+δ ) with d 3 \frac12{\delta\geq\frac{1}{2}} for p = 1. The convergence rate of our multilevel solver is essentially the same for a purely polynomial approximation and an enriched approximation.     

Decomposing a simple polygon into pseudo-triangles and convex polygons

In this paper we consider the problem of decomposing a simple polygon into subpolygons that exclusively use vertices of the given polygon. We allow two types of subpolygons: pseudo-triangles and convex polygons. We call the resulting decomposition PT-convex. We are interested in minimum decompositions, i.e., in decomposing the input polygon into the least number of subpolygons. Allowing subpolygons of one of two types has the potential to reduce the complexity of the resulting decomposition considerably.The problem of decomposing a simple polygon into the least number of convex polygons has been considered. We extend a dynamic-programming algorithm of Keil and Snoeyink for that problem to the case that both convex polygons and pseudo-triangles are allowed. Our algorithm determines such a decomposition in O(n³) time and space, where n is the number of the vertices of the polygon.     

Decompositions and boundary coverings of non-convex fat polyhedra

We show that any locally-fat (or (α,β)-covered) polyhedron with convex fat faces can be decomposed into O(n) tetrahedra, where n is the number of vertices of the polyhedron. We also show that the restriction that the faces are fat is necessary: there are locally-fat polyhedra with non-fat faces that require Ω(n²) pieces in any convex decomposition. Furthermore, we show that if we want the tetrahedra in the decomposition to be fat themselves, then their number cannot be bounded as a function of n in the worst case. Finally, we obtain several results on the problem where we want to only cover the boundary of the polyhedron, and not its entire interior.     

Bisection is not optimal on the average

Summary We seek the zero of a continuous increasing functionf: [0, 1] [–1, 1] such thatf(0)=–1 andf(1)=1. It is known that the bisection method makes optimal use ofn function evaluations within a worst case analysis. In this paper we study the average error with respect to the natural measure of Graf et al. (1986). We prove that the bisection method is not optimal on the average. Actually, the average error of the bisection method is about (1/2) ⁿ , while the average error of the optimal method is less than ⁿ with some <1/2.     

Graph bisection algorithms with good average case behavior

In the paper, we describe a polynomial time algorithm that, for every input graph, either outputs the minimum bisection of the graph or halts without output. More importantly, we show that the algorithm chooses the former course with high probability for many natural classes of graphs. In particular, for every fixedd≧3, all sufficiently largen and allb=o(n ^{1?1/[(d+1)/2]}), the algorithm finds the minimum bisection for almost alld-regular labelled simple graphs with 2n nodes and bisection widthb. For example, the algorithm succeeds for almost all 5-regular graphs with 2n nodes and bisection widtho(n ^2/3). The algorithm differs from other graph bisection heuristics (as well as from many heuristics for other NP-complete problems) in several respects. Most notably:

1. the algorithm provides exactly the minimum bisection for almost all input graphs with the specified form, instead of only an approximation of the minimum bisection,
2. whenever the algorithm produces a bisection, it is guaranteed to be optimal (i.e., the algorithm also produces a proof that the bisection it outputs is an optimal bisection),
3. the algorithm works well both theoretically and experimentally,
4. the algorithm employs global methods such as network flow instead of local operations such as 2-changes, and
5. the algorithm works well for graphs with small bisections (as opposed to graphs with large bisections, for which arbitrary bisections are nearly optimal).

     

Bounding Ramsey numbers through large deviation inequalities

We develop a new approach for proving lower bounds for various Ramsey numbers, based on using large deviation inequalities. This approach enables us to obtain the bounds for the off-diagonal Ramsey numbers R(K^r, K^k), r ≤ k, that match the best known bounds, obtained through the local lemma. We discuss also the bounds for a related Ramsey-type problem and show, for example, that there exists a K⁴-free graph G on n vertices in which every cn^3/5 log^1/2 n vertices span a copy of K³. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Local Multilevel Method on Adaptively Refined Meshes for Elliptic Problems with Smooth Complex Coefficients

In this paper, a local multilevel algorithm is investigated for solving linear systems arising from adaptive finite element approximations of second order elliptic problems with smooth complex coefficients. It is shown that the abstract theory for local multilevel algorithm can also be applied to elliptic problems whose dominant coefficient is complex valued. Assuming that the coarsest mesh size is sufficiently small, we prove that this algorithm with Gauss-Seidel smoother is convergent and optimal on the adaptively refined meshes generated by the newest vertex bisection algorithm. Numerical experiments are reported to confirm the theoretical analysis.     

Unavoidable Configurations in Complete Topological Graphs

A topological graph is a graph drawn in the plane so that its vertices are represented by points, and its edges are represented by Jordan curves connecting the corresponding points, with the property that any two curves have at most one point in common. We define two canonical classes of topological complete graphs, and prove that every topological complete graph with n vertices has a canonical subgraph of size at least clog^1/8 n, which belongs to one of these classes. We also show that every complete topological graph with n vertices has a non-crossing subgraph isomorphic to any fixed tree with at most clog^1/6 n vertices.