A massively parallel geometric multigrid solver on hierarchically distributed grids

A parallel geometric multigrid solver on hierarchically distributed grids is presented. Using a tree-structure for grid distribution onto the processing entities, the multigrid cycle is performed similarly to the serial algorithm, using additional vertical communication during transfer operations. The workload is gathered to fewer processes on coarser levels. Involved parallel structures are described in detail and the multigrid algorithm is formulated, discussing parallelization details. A performance study is presented that shows close to optimal efficiency for weak scaling up to 262k processes in 2 and 3 space dimensions.