Parallel-in-Time Solver for the All-at-Once Runge--Kutta Discretization

In this article, we derive fast and robust parallel-in-time preconditioned iterative methods for the all-at-once linear systems arising upon discretization of time-dependent PDEs. The discretization we employ is based on a Runge--Kutta method in time, for which the development of parallel solvers is an emerging research area in the literature of numerical methods for time-dependent PDEs. By making use of classical theory of block matrices, one is able to derive a preconditioner for the systems considered. The block structure of the preconditioner allows for parallelism in the time variable, as long as one is able to provide an optimal solver for the system of the stages of the method. We thus propose a preconditioner for the latter system based on a singular value decomposition (SVD) of the (real) Runge--Kutta matrix ARK=UΣV⊤. Supposing ARK is invertible, we prove that the spectrum of the system for the stages preconditioned by our SVD-based preconditioner is contained within the right-half of the unit circle, under suitable assumptions on the matrix U⊤V (the assumptions are well posed due to the polar decomposition of ARK). We show the numerical efficiency of our SVD-based preconditioner by solving the system of the stages arising from the discretization of the heat equation and the Stokes equations, with sequential time-stepping. Finally, we provide numerical results of the all-at-once approach for both problems, showing the speed-up achieved on a parallel architecture.