Preconditioning of symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin FEM for elliptic problems∗

This is a further development of [10] regarding multilevel preconditioning for symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin finite element approximations of second order elliptic problems. We assume that the mesh on the finest level is a results of a geometrically refined fixed coarse mesh. The preconditioner is a multilevel method that uses a sequence of finite element spaces of either continuous or piece-wise constant functions. The spaces are nested, but due to the penalty term in the DG method the corresponding forms are not inherited. For the continuous finite element spaces we show that the variable V-cycle provides an optimal preconditioner for the DG system. The piece-wise constant functions do not have approximation property so in order to control the energy growth of the inter-level transfer operator we apply W–cycle MG. Finally, we present a number of numerical experiments that support the theoretical findings.