Howard C. Elman

Kookjin Lee, Howard C. Elman

In this study, we consider the numerical solution of large systems of linear equations obtained from the stochastic Galerkin formulation of stochastic partial differential equations. We propose an iterative algorithm that exploits the Kronecker product structure of the linear systems. The proposed algorithm efficiently approximates the solutions in low-rank tensor format. Using standard Krylov subspace methods for the data in tensor format is computationally prohibitive due to the rapid growth of tensor ranks during the iterations. To keep tensor ranks low over the entire iteration process, we devise a rank-reduction scheme that can be combined with the iterative algorithm. The proposed rank-reduction scheme identifies an important subspace in the stochastic domain and compresses tensors of high rank on-the-fly during the iterations. The proposed reduction scheme is a multilevel method in that the important subspace can be identified inexpensively in a coarse spatial grid setting. The efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated by numerical experiments on benchmark problems.

Bedřich Sousedík, Howard C. Elman

We study the steady-state Navier-Stokes equations in the context of stochastic finite element discretizations. Specifically, we assume that the viscosity is a random field given in the form of a generalized polynomial chaos expansion. For the resulting stochastic problem, we formulate the model and linearization schemes using Picard and Newton iterations in the framework of the stochastic Galerkin method, and we explore properties of the resulting stochastic solutions. We also propose a preconditioner for solving the linear systems of equations arising at each step of the stochastic (Galerkin) nonlinear iteration and demonstrate its effectiveness for solving a set of benchmark problems.

Howard C. Elman, Tengfei Su

We study efficient solution methods for stochastic eigenvalue problems arising from discretization of self-adjoint partial differential equations with random data. With the stochastic Galerkin approach, the solutions are represented as generalized polynomial chaos expansions. A low-rank variant of the inverse subspace iteration algorithm is presented for computing one or several minimal eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors of parameter-dependent matrices. In the algorithm, the iterates are approximated by low-rank matrices, which leads to significant cost savings. The algorithm is tested on two benchmark problems, a stochastic diffusion problem with some poorly separated eigenvalues, and an operator derived from a discrete stochastic Stokes problem whose minimal eigenvalue is related to the inf-sup stability constant. Numerical experiments show that the low-rank algorithm produces accurate solutions compared to the Monte Carlo method, and it uses much less computational time than the original algorithm without low-rank approximation.

Kookjin Lee, Howard C. Elman, Bedřich Sousedík

We study an iterative low-rank approximation method for the solution of the steady-state stochastic Navier--Stokes equations with uncertain viscosity. The method is based on linearization schemes using Picard and Newton iterations and stochastic finite element discretizations of the linearized problems. For computing the low-rank approximate solution, we adapt the nonlinear iterations to an inexact and low-rank variant, where the solution of the linear system at each nonlinear step is approximated by a quantity of low rank. This is achieved by using a tensor variant of the GMRES method as a solver for the linear systems. We explore the inexact low-rank nonlinear iteration with a set of benchmark problems, using a model of flow over an obstacle, under various configurations characterizing the statistical features of the uncertain viscosity, and we demonstrate its effectiveness by extensive numerical experiments.

Howard C. Elman, Virginia Forstall

Reduced-order modeling is an efficient approach for solving parameterized discrete partial differential equations when the solution is needed at many parameter values. An offline step approximates the solution space and an online step utilizes this approximation, the reduced basis, to solve a smaller reduced problem at significantly lower cost, producing an accurate estimate of the solution. For nonlinear problems, however, standard methods do not achieve the desired cost savings. Empirical interpolation methods represent a modification of this methodology used for cases of nonlinear operators or nonaffine parameter dependence. These methods identify points in the discretization necessary for representing the nonlinear component of the reduced model accurately, and they incur online computational costs that are independent of the spatial dimension $N$. We will show that empirical interpolation methods can be used to significantly reduce the costs of solving parameterized versions of the Navier-Stokes equations, and that iterative solution methods can be used in place of direct methods to further reduce the costs of solving the algebraic systems arising from reduced-order models.

Bedřich Sousedík, Howard C. Elman

We study random eigenvalue problems in the context of spectral stochastic finite elements. In particular, given a parameter-dependent, symmetric positive-definite matrix operator, we explore the performance of algorithms for computing its eigenvalues and eigenvectors represented using polynomial chaos expansions. We formulate a version of stochastic inverse subspace iteration, which is based on the stochastic Galerkin finite element method, and we compare its accuracy with that of Monte Carlo and stochastic collocation methods. The coefficients of the eigenvalue expansions are computed from a stochastic Rayleigh quotient. Our approach allows the computation of interior eigenvalues by deflation methods, and we can also compute the coefficients of multiple eigenvectors using a stochastic variant of the modified Gram-Schmidt process. The effectiveness of the methods is illustrated by numerical experiments on benchmark problems arising from vibration analysis.

Howard C. Elman, Tengfei Su

We study a multigrid method for solving large linear systems of equations with tensor product structure. Such systems are obtained from stochastic finite element discretization of stochastic partial differential equations such as the steady-state diffusion problem with random coefficients. When the variance in the problem is not too large, the solution can be well approximated by a low-rank object. In the proposed multigrid algorithm, the matrix iterates are truncated to low rank to reduce memory requirements and computational effort. The method is proved convergent with an analytic error bound. Numerical experiments show its effectiveness in solving the Galerkin systems compared to the original multigrid solver, especially when the number of degrees of freedom associated with the spatial discretization is large.

Kookjin Lee, Kevin Carlberg, Howard C. Elman

We consider the numerical solution of parameterized linear systems where the system matrix, the solution, and the right-hand side are parameterized by a set of uncertain input parameters. We explore spectral methods in which the solutions are approximated in a chosen finite-dimensional subspace. It has been shown that the stochastic Galerkin projection technique fails to minimize any measure of the solution error [20]. As a remedy for this, we propose a novel stochastic least-squares Petrov--Galerkin (LSPG) method. The proposed method is optimal in the sense that it produces the solution that minimizes a weighted l2-norm of the residual over all solutions in a given finite-dimensional subspace. Moreover, the method can be adapted to minimize the solution error in different weighted l2-norms by simply applying a weighting function within the least-squares formulation. In addition, a goal-oriented semi-norm induced by an output quantity of interest can be minimized by defining a weighting function as a linear functional of the solution. We establish optimality and error bounds for the proposed method, and extensive numerical experiments show that the weighted LSPG methods outperforms other spectral methods in minimizing corresponding target weighted norms.

Howard C. Elman, David J. Silvester

Eigenvalue analysis is a well-established tool for stability analysis of dynamical systems. However, there are situations where eigenvalues miss some important features of physical models. For example, in models of incompressible fluid dynamics, there are examples where linear stability analysis predicts stability but transient simulations exhibit significant growth of infinitesimal perturbations. This behavior can be predicted by pseudo-spectral analysis. In this study, we show that an approach similar to pseudo-spectral analysis can be performed inexpensively using stochastic collocation methods and the results can be used to provide quantitative information about instability. In addition, we demonstrate that the results of the perturbation analysis provide insight into the behavior of unsteady flow simulations.

Heyrim Cho, Howard C. Elman

The combination of reduced basis and collocation methods enables efficient and accurate evaluation of the solutions to parameterized PDEs. In this paper, we study the stochastic collocation methods that can be combined with reduced basis methods to solve high-dimensional parameterized stochastic PDEs. We also propose an adaptive algorithm using a probabilistic collocation method (PCM) and ANOVA decomposition. This procedure involves two stages. First, the method employs an ANOVA decomposition to identify the effective dimensions, i.e., subspaces of the parameter space in which the contributions to the solution are larger, and sort the reduced basis solution in a descending order of error. Then, the adaptive search refines the parametric space by increasing the order of polynomials until the algorithm is terminated by a saturation constraint. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for solving a stationary stochastic convection-diffusion equation, a benchmark problem chosen because solutions contain steep boundary layers and anisotropic features. We show that two stages of adaptivity are critical in a benchmark problem with anisotropic stochasticity.