Lena-Maria Pfurtscheller

Hermann Mena, Alexander Ostermann, Lena-Maria Pfurtscheller et al.

The efficient numerical integration of large-scale matrix differential equations is a topical problem in numerical analysis and of great importance in many applications. Standard numerical methods applied to such problems require an unduly amount of computing time and memory, in general. Based on a dynamical low-rank approximation of the solution, a new splitting integrator is proposed for a quite general class of stiff matrix differential equations. This class comprises differential Lyapunov and differential Riccati equations that arise from spatial discretizations of partial differential equations. The proposed integrator handles stiffness in an efficient way, and it preserves the symmetry and positive semidefiniteness of solutions of differential Lyapunov equations. Numerical examples that illustrate the benefits of this new method are given. In particular, numerical results for the efficient simulation of the weather phenomenon El Niño are presented.

Hermann Mena, Lena-Maria Pfurtscheller, Tony Stillfjord

We consider differential Lyapunov and Riccati equations, and generalized versions thereof. Such equations arise in many different areas and are especially important within the field of optimal control. In order to approximate their solution, one may use several different kinds of numerical methods. Of these, splitting schemes are often a very competitive choice. In this article, we investigate the use of graphical processing units (GPUs) to parallelize such schemes and thereby further increase their effectiveness. According to our numerical experiments, large speed-ups are often observed for sufficiently large matrices. We also provide a comparison between different splitting strategies, demonstrating that splitting the equations into a moderate number of subproblems is generally optimal.