Two-level preconditioning of discontinuous Galerkin approximations of second-order elliptic equations

This paper reviews some known and proposes some new preconditioning methods for a number of discontinuous Galerkin (or DG) finite element approximations for elliptic problems of second order. Nested hierarchy of meshes is generally assumed. Our approach utilizes a general two-level scheme, where the finite element space for the DG method is decomposed into a subspace (viewed as an auxiliary or 'coarse' space), plus a correction which can be handled by a standard smoothing procedure. We consider three different auxiliary subspaces, namely, piecewise linear C⁰-conforming functions, piecewise linear functions that are continuous at the centroids of the edges/faces (Crouzeix-Raviart finite elements) and piecewise constant functions over the finite elements. To support the theoretical results, we also present numerical experiments for 3-D model problem showing uniform convergence of the constructed methods.