Parallel bidomain preconditioners for cardiac excitation

A multilevel hybrid Newton-Krylov-Schwarz (NKS) method is constructed and studied numerically for implicit time discretizations of the Bidomain reaction-diffusion system in three dimensions. This model describes the bioelectrical activity of the heart by coupling two degenerate parabolic equations with a stiff system of ordinary differential equations. The NKS Bidomain solver employs an outer inexact Newton iteration to solve the nonlinear finite element system originating at each time step of the implicit discretization. The Jacobian update during the Newton iteration is solved by a Krylov method employing a multilevel hybrid overlapping Schwarz preconditioner, additive within the levels and multiplicative among the levels. Parallel tests on Linux clusters are performed, showing that the convergence of the method is independent of the number of subdomains (scalability), the discretization parameters and the number of levels (optimality).