Nonstandard coarse spaces and Schwarz methods for elliptic problems with discontinuous coefficients using non-conforming elements

Summary. Two-level domain decomposition methods are developed for a simple nonconforming approximation of second order elliptic problems. A bound is established for the condition number of these iterative methods, that grows only logarithmically with the number of degrees of freedom in each subregion. This bound holds for two and three dimensions and is independent of jumps in the value of the coefficients and number of subregions. We introduce face coarse spaces, and isomorphisms to map between conforming and nonconforming spaces. ReceivedMarch 1, 1995 / Revised version received January 16, 1996