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We introduce AMGe, an algebraic multigrid method for solving the discrete equations that arise in Ritz-type finite element methods for partial differential equations. Assuming access to the element stiffness matrices, we have that AMGe is based on the use of two local measures, which are derived from global measures that appear in existing multigrid theory. These new measures are used to determine local representations of algebraically "smooth" error components that provide the basis for constructing effective interpolation and, hence, the coarsening process for AMG. Here, we focus on the interpolation process; choice of the coarse "grids" based on these measures is the subject of current research. We develop a theoretical foundation for AMGe and present numerical results that demonstrate the efficacy of the method.

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Substantial effort has been focused over the last two decades on developing multilevel iterative methods capable of solving the large linear systems encountered in engineering practice. These systems often arise from discretizing partial differential equations over unstructured meshes, and the particular parameters or geometry of the physical problem being discretized may be unavailable to the solver. Algebraic multigrid (AMG) and multilevel domain decomposition methods of algebraic type have been of particular interest in this context because of their promises of optimal performance without the need for explicit knowledge of the problem geometry. These methods construct a hierarchy of coarse problems based on the linear system itself and on certain assumptions about the smooth components of the error. For smoothed aggregation (SA) multigrid methods applied to discretizations of elliptic problems, these assumptions typically consist of knowledge of the near-kernel or near-nullspace of the weak form. This paper introduces an extension of the SA method in which good convergence properties are achieved in situations where explicit knowledge of the near-kernel components is unavailable. This extension is accomplished in an adaptive process that uses the method itself to determine near-kernel components and adjusts the coarsening processes accordingly.

Abstract. A smoothed aggregation multigrid method is presented for the numerical calculation of the stationary probability vector of an irreducible sparse Markov chain. It is shown how smoothing the interpolation and restriction operators can dramatically increase the efficiency of aggregation multigrid methods for Markov chains that have been proposed in the literature. The proposed smoothing approach is inspired by smoothed aggregation multigrid for linear systems, supplemented with a new lumping technique that assures well-posedness of the coarse-level problems: the coarse-level operators are singular M-matrices on all levels, resulting in strictly positive coarse-level corrections on all levels. Numerical results show how these methods lead to nearly optimal multigrid efficiency for an extensive set of test problems, both when geometric and algebraic aggregation strategies are used.