A two-level domain decomposition method for the iterative solution of high frequency exterior Helmholtz problems

Summary. We present a Lagrange multiplier based two-level domain decomposition method for solving iteratively large-scale systems of equations arising from the finite element discretization of high-frequency exterior Helmholtz problems. The proposed method is essentially an extension of the regularized FETI (Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting) method to indefinite problems. Its two key ingredients are the regularization of each subdomain matrix by a complex interface lumped mass matrix, and the preconditioning of the interface problem by an auxiliary coarse problem constructed to enforce at each iteration the orthogonality of the residual to a set of carefully chosen planar waves. We show numerically that the proposed method is scalable with respect to the mesh size, the subdomain size, and the wavenumber. We report performance results for a submarine application that highlight the efficiency of the proposed method for the solution of high frequency acoustic scattering problems discretized by finite elements.