Jan Zapletal

Homogenized coefficients of periodic structures are calculated via an auxiliary partial differential equation in the periodic cell. Typically, a volume finite element discretization is employed for the numerical solution. In this paper, we reformulate the problem as a boundary integral equation using Steklov–Poincaré operators. The resulting boundary element method only discretizes the boundary of the periodic cell and the interface between the materials within the cell. We prove that the homogenized coefficients converge super‐linearly with the mesh size, and we support the theory with examples in two and three dimensions.

We describe a parallel solver for the discretized weakly singular space-time boundary integral equation of the spatially two-dimensional heat equation. The global space-time nature of the system matrices leads to improved parallel scalability in distributed memory systems in contrast to time-stepping methods where the parallelization is usually limited to spatial dimensions. We present a parallelization technique which is based on a decomposition of the input mesh into submeshes and a distribution of the corresponding blocks of the system matrices among processors. To ensure load balancing, the distribution is based on a cylic decomposition of complete graphs. In addition, the solution of the global linear system requires the use of an efficient preconditioner. We present a robust preconditioning strategy which is based on boundary integral operators of opposite order, and extend the introduced parallel solver to the preconditioned system.