Geometric Multigrid Preconditioners for conforming Finite Element Methods on Arbitrarily Agglomerated Meshes

Geometric multigrid methods for conforming finite element discretisations classically require a nested mesh hierarchy, forcing coarse meshes to be conforming, which is unsuitable for general domains. In order to eliminate this geometric constraint, we introduce and analyse a family of multilevel auxiliary space preconditioners. At the first level, a conforming Lagrangian discretisation on a fine simplicial mesh is preconditioned by a non-conforming polytopal discretisation posed on an arbitrarily agglomerated coarse mesh. At the subsequent levels, the coarse problem is solved by a geometric multigrid method for that polytopal discretisation on further agglomerated meshes, so that the whole hierarchy is generated from the fine mesh by agglomeration alone. We consider two polytopal discretisations, a symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method and a hybrid high-order method. The prolongation operator at the first level is an element-wise interpolation onto the fine mesh followed by nodal averaging, preceded in the hybrid high-order case by a local potential reconstruction. For point-Jacobi and vertex-star patch additive Schwarz smoothers, we prove that the condition number of the preconditioned system is bounded by O((H/h)³), where $H/h$ is the coarsening ratio, and by O((H/h)²) for the DG variant with penalty proportional to $H/h$. Numerical experiments in two and three dimensions, on structured and unstructured meshes with agglomerates generated by automatic clustering algorithms, confirm the robustness of the preconditioners.