Coalesced Matrix-Free Geometric Multigrid on Persistent Cell-Wise Storage

Abstract

We present a geometric multigrid preconditioner for high-order continuous finite elements that operates entirely on redundant, cell-wise stored vectors: the assembled global vector is never formed on any level of the hierarchy. In this storage paradigm the machinery that classically complicates adaptive multigrid dissolves. Hanging-node constraints are never assembled: we prove that the plain tensor-product transfer operators, applied to the \emph{unassembled} residual, algebraically reproduce the classical constrained restriction, including the action of the transposed constraint matrix, and the edge operators of local smoothing reduce to a pointwise masking of the residual, with no splitting of the level operator into interior and edge blocks. As a consequence, the single inter-cell primitive of the whole V-cycle can use a topologically oblivious structured kernel even on adaptively refined meshes. We prove that the resulting cell-wise V-cycle is equivalent, iterate by iterate, to the classical local multigrid method, and therefore inherits its convergence theory. Numerical experiments for the Laplace operator confirm grid-independent convergence that is essentially unaffected by local refinement; on a single GPU, using nothing more than a masked point-Jacobi smoother, the solver sustains up to $1.1$\, GDoF/s per V-cycle in double precision and reaches end-to-end solve throughput on par with patch-smoother-based solvers.