Parallel and energy conservative/dissipative schemes for sine–Gordon and Allen–Cahn equations

The sine–Gordon and Allen–Cahn equations are two typical models in the fields of conservative Hamiltonian systems and dissipative gradient flows, respectively. As the demand for numerical methods that respect intrinsic energy conservation/dissipation laws turns into a fundamental principle, the subsequent computational efficiency is getting more and more desired. Linearly implicit methods, which only require solutions of linear algebraic systems at each time step, have become a popular way to design efficient schemes. However, the overall computational cost of these methods depends heavily on the speed at which the linear system can be solved. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach for developing highly efficient energy-conservative or dissipative schemes for the sine–Gordon and Allen–Cahn equations. Our approach is based on spatial finite difference approximations and is fully implicit at first glance, but actually it is completely decoupled point by point, allowing for the implementation of a scalar nonlinear equation successively with a lower complexity that is comparable only to the degrees of freedom. We further establish the connections between our approach and the classic Itoh–Abe discrete gradient and the partitioned averaged vector field methods, and then propose the generalized Itoh–Abe discrete gradient method, which offers great flexibility in the ordering of updating each unknown point. One immediate benefit is that we can specifically choose an ordering to achieve a naturally parallel computation of the resulting scheme, significantly improving the computational efficiency. Various numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed schemes.