Automated Galerkin time stepping in Irksome
This work addresses the need for accessible, automated Galerkin-in-time discretizations for researchers and practitioners in numerical PDEs, reducing the barrier to using structure-preserving time integration methods.
The paper presents automated Galerkin-in-time discretization in the Irksome library, enabling both discontinuous Galerkin and continuous Petrov-Galerkin time stepping for semidiscrete variational problems, with support for auxiliary variables, flexible quadrature, and monolithic solvers. Numerical examples demonstrate accuracy, solver performance, and structure preservation across representative PDE systems.
As the study of temporal and spatial discretization schemes continues to advance, recent work has focused on the use of Galerkin-in-time discretization schemes that enable broader structure-preservation than is known for Runge-Kutta integrators. While the promise of such discretizations is immense, their realization has, until now, generally relied on bespoke implementations that have limited their wider use. In this work, we present automation in Irksome for both discontinuous Galerkin and continuous Petrov-Galerkin time stepping of semidiscrete variational problems. The implementation supports auxiliary variables, flexible temporal quadrature, and monolithic algebraic solvers, and it enables switching between Runge-Kutta and Galerkin-in-time formulations with minimal changes to user code. Numerical examples illustrate accuracy, solver performance, and structure preservation across representative PDE systems.