A new extrapolation cascadic multigrid method for 3D elliptic boundary value problems on rectangular domains

In this paper, we develop a new extrapolation cascadic multigrid (ECMG$_{jcg}$) method, which makes it possible to solve 3D elliptic boundary value problems on rectangular domains of over 100 million unknowns on a desktop computer in minutes. First, by combining Richardson extrapolation and tri-quadratic Serendipity interpolation techniques, we introduce a new extrapolation formula to provide a good initial guess for the iterative solution on the next finer grid, which is a third order approximation to the finite element (FE) solution. And the resulting large sparse linear system from the FE discretization is then solved by the Jacobi-preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (JCG) method. Additionally, instead of performing a fixed number of iterations as cascadic multigrid (CMG) methods, a relative residual stopping criterion is used in iterative solvers, which enables us to obtain conveniently the numerical solution with the desired accuracy. Moreover, a simple Richardson extrapolation is used to cheaply get a fourth order approximate solution on the entire fine grid. Test results are reported to show that ECMG$_{jcg}$ has much better efficiency compared to the classical MG methods. Since the initial guess for the iterative solution is a quite good approximation to the FE solution, numerical results show that only few number of iterations are required on the finest grid for ECMG$_{jcg}$ with an appropriate tolerance of the relative residual to achieve full second order accuracy, which is particularly important when solving large systems of equations and can greatly reduce the computational cost. It should be pointed out that when the tolerance becomes smaller, ECMG$_{jcg}$ still needs only few iterations to obtain fourth order extrapolated solution on each grid, except on the finest grid. Finally, we present the reason why our ECMG algorithms are so highly efficient for solving such problems.