A Fast Direct Solver for Elliptic PDEs on a Hierarchy of Adaptively Refined Quadtrees

Damyn Chipman, Donna Calhoun, Carsten Burstedde

Published 2024-02-22, updated 2024-04-05Version 2

We describe a fast, direct solver for elliptic partial differential equations on a two-dimensional hierarchy of adaptively refined, Cartesian meshes. Our solver, inspired by the Hierarchical Poincar\'e-Steklov (HPS) method introduced by Gillman and Martinsson (SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 2014) uses fast solvers on locally uniform Cartesian patches stored in the leaves of a quadtree and is the first such solver that works directly with the adaptive quadtree mesh managed using the grid management library \pforest (C. Burstedde, L. Wilcox, O. Ghattas, SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 2011). Within each Cartesian patch, stored in leaves of the quadtree, we use a second order finite volume discretization on cell-centered meshes. Key contributions of our algorithm include 4-to-1 merge and split implementations for the HPS build stage and solve stage, respectively. We demonstrate our solver on Poisson and Helmholtz problems with a mesh adapted to the high local curvature of the right-hand side.