The swept rule for breaking the latency barrier in time advancing PDEs

Abstract

This article investigates the swept rule of space–time domain decomposition, an idea to break the latency barrier via communicating less often when explicitly solving time-dependent PDEs. The swept rule decomposes space and time among computing nodes in ways that exploit the domains of influence and the domain of dependency, making it possible to communicate once per many timesteps without redundant computation. The article presents simple theoretical analysis to the performance of the swept rule which then was shown to be accurate by conducting numerical experiments.