Preconditioning the coarse problem of BDDC methods - Three-level, algebraic multigrid, and vertex-based preconditioners

A fair comparison of three Balancing Domain Decomposition by Constraints (BDDC) methods with an approximate coarse space solver is attempted for the first time. The comparison is made for a BDDC method with an algebraic multigrid preconditioner for the coarse problem, a three-level BDDC method, and a BDDC method with a vertex-based coarse preconditioner which was recently introduced by Clark Dohrmann, Kendall Pierson, and Olof Widlund. For the first time, all methods are presented and discussed in a common framework. Condition number bounds are provided for all approaches. All methods are implemented in a common highly parallel scalable BDDC software package based on PETSc, to allow for a fair comparison. Numerical results showing the parallel scalability are presented for the equations of linear elasticity. For the first time, this includes parallel scalability tests for the vertex-based approximate BDDC method