A Parallel Space-time Domain Decomposition Method for Unsteady Source Inversion Problems

In this paper, we propose a parallel space-time domain decomposition method for solving an unsteady source identification problem governed by the linear convection-diffusion equation. Traditional approaches require to solve repeatedly a forward parabolic system, an adjoint system and a system with respect to the unknown sources. The three systems have to be solved one after another. These sequential steps are not desirable for large scale parallel computing. A space-time restrictive additive Schwarz method is proposed for a fully implicit space-time coupled discretization scheme to recover the timedependent pollutant source intensity functions. We show with numerical experiments that the scheme works well with noise in the observation data. More importantly it is demonstrated that the parallel space-time Schwarz preconditioner is scalable on a supercomputer with over 103 processors, thus promising for large scale applications.