Adaptive total variation stable local timestepping for conservation laws

This paper proposes a first-order total variation diminishing (TVD) treatment for coarsening and refining of local timestep size in response to dynamic local variations in wave speeds for nonlinear conservation laws. The algorithm is accompanied with a proof of formal correctness showing that given a sufficiently small minimum timestep the algorithm will produce a TVD solution for nonlinear scalar conservation laws. A key feature of the algorithm is its formulation as a discrete event simulation, which allows for easy and efficient parallelization using existing software. Numerical results demonstrate the stability and adaptivity of the method for the shallow water equations. We also introduce a performance model to load balance and explain the observed performance gains. Performance results are presented for a single node on Stampede2's Skylake partition using an optimistic parallel discrete event simulator. Results show the proposed algorithm recovering 59%-77% of the theoretically achievable speed-up with the remainder being attributed to the cost of computing the CFL condition and load imbalance.