A Local Corrections Algorithm for Solving Poisson's Equation in Three Dimensions

Presenter: Phil Colella
Other Authors: Peter McCorquodale, Gregory Balls, and Scott Baden
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We present a second-order accurate algorithm for solving the free-space Poisson's equation on a locally-refined nested grid hierarchy in three dimensions. Our approach is based on a linear superposition of local convolutions of localized charge distributions, with the nonlocal coupling represented on coarser grids. The representation of the nonlocal coupling is based on Anderson's Method of Local Corrections and does not require iteration between different grid resolutions. A distributed-memory parallel implementation of this method is observed to have a computational cost per grid point less than three times that of a standard FFT-based method on a uniform grid of the same resolution, and spends less than 4% of the time in MPI communications for problems up to size 3 billion mesh points run on up to 1024 processors.