Construction and Optimization of Summation-by-Parts Operators for General Function Spaces Using an Improved Generalized Gaussian Quadrature Algorithm

Abstract

We construct optimized summation-by-parts (SBP) operators for general function spaces with provably minimal degrees of freedom on open, closed, and half-open nodal distributions. These operators rely on generalized Gaussian quadrature rules, for which we present an improved algorithm that is flexible, efficient, and provably convergent. In cases where free parameters are available, we further introduce two operator optimization strategies. We test our operators on a handful of numerical examples that contain large or unbounded gradients, in which some a priori knowledge of the solution has been assumed to select an appropriate basis. The novel operators are found to outperform standard polynomial operators by several orders of magnitude in solution accuracy relative to degrees of freedom. Furthermore, our novel operators significantly outperform function-space SBP operators with equispaced nodal distributions, which require significantly more nodes for the same operator basis. Finally, we demonstrate that the operator optimization procedures are critical to achieving accurate and efficient discretizations, as the standard SBP construction procedure can lead to nullspace-inconsistent and poorly-conditioned operators.