Efficient Smoothers for All-at-once Multigrid Methods for Poisson and Stokes Control Problems

In the present paper we concentrate on an important issue in constructing a good multigrid solver: the choice of an efficient smoother. We will introduce all-at-once multigrid solvers for optimal control problems which show robust convergence in the grid size and in the regularization parameter. We will refer to recent publications that guarantee such a convergence behavior. These publications do not pay much attention to the construction of the smoother and suggest to use a normal equation smoother. We will see that using a Gauss Seidel like variant of this smoother, the overall multigrid solver is speeded up by a factor of about two with no additional work. The author will give a proof which indicates that also the Gauss Seidel like variant of the smoother is covered by the convergence theory. Numerical experiments suggest that the proposed method are competitive with Vanka type methods.