Toward an efficient parallel in time method for partial differential equations

A new method for the parallelization of numerical methods for partial differential equations (PDEs) in the temporal direction is presented. The method is iterative with each iteration consisting of deferred correction sweeps performed alternately on fine and coarse space-time discretizations. The coarse grid problems are formulated using a space-time analog of the full approximation scheme popular in multigrid methods for nonlinear equations. The current approach is intended to provide an additional avenue for parallelization for PDE simulations that are already saturated in the spatial dimensions. Numerical results and timings on PDEs in one, two, and three space dimensions demonstrate the potential for the approach to provide efficient parallelization in the temporal direction.