This paper focuses on coordinate update methods, which are useful for solving problems involving large or high-dimensional datasets. They decompose a problem into simple subproblems, where each updates one, or a small block of, variables while fixing others. These methods can deal with linear and nonlinear mappings, smooth and nonsmooth functions, as well as convex and nonconvex problems. In addition, they are easy to parallelize. The great performance of coordinate update methods depends on solving simple sub-problems. To derive simple subproblems for several new classes of applications, this paper systematically studies coordinate-friendly operators that perform low-cost coordinate updates. Based on the discovered coordinate friendly operators, as well as operator splitting techniques, we obtain new coordinate update algorithms for a variety of problems in machine learning, image processing, as well as sub-areas of optimization. Several problems are treated with coordinate update for the first time in history. The obtained algorithms are scalable to large instances through parallel and even asynchronous computing. We present numerical examples to illustrate how effective these algorithms are.

In earlier work, two of the authors developed a high order accurate numerical boundary condition procedure for hyperbolic conservation laws, which allows the computation using high order finite difference schemes on Cartesian meshes to solve problems in arbitrary physical domains whose boundaries do not coincide with grid lines. This procedure is based on the so-called inverse Lax-Wendroff (ILW) procedure for inflow boundary conditions and high order extrapolation for outflow boundary conditions. However, the algebra of the ILW procedure is quite heavy for two dimensional (2D) hyperbolic systems, which makes it difficult to implement the procedure for order of accuracy higher than three. In this paper, we first discuss a simplified and improved implementation for this procedure, which uses the relatively complicated ILW procedure only for the evaluation of the first order normal derivatives. Fifth order WENO type extrapolation is used for all other derivatives, regardless of the direction of the local characteristics and the smoothness of the solution. This makes the implementation of a fifth order boundary treatment practical for 2D systems with source terms. For no-penetration boundary condition of compressible inviscid flows, a further simplification is discussed, in which the evaluation of the tangential derivatives involved in the ILW procedure is avoided. We test our simplified and improved boundary treatment for Euler equations with or without source terms representing chemical reactions in detonations. The results demonstrate the designed fifth order accuracy, stability, and good performance for problems involving complicated interactions between detonation/shock waves and solid boundaries.

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In this paper, we study the superconvergence of the error for the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method for linear conservation laws when upwind fluxes are used. We prove that if we apply piecewise $k$-th degree polynomials, the error between the DG solution and the exact solution is ($k+2$)-th order superconvergent at the downwind-biased Radau points with suitable initial discretization. Moreover, we also prove the DG solution is ($k+2$)-th order superconvergent both for the cell averages and for the error to a particular projection of the exact solution. The superconvergence result in this paper leads to a new {\em a posteriori} error estimate. Our analysis is valid for arbitrary regular meshes and for $\mathcal{P}^k$ polynomials with arbitrary $k\geq1$, and for both periodic boundary conditions and for initial-boundary value problems. We perform numerical experiments to demonstrate that the superconvergence rate proved in this paper is optimal.

Robustness of numerical methods has attracted an increasing interest in the community of computational fluid dynamics. One mathematical aspect of robustness for numerical methods is the positivity-preserving property. At high Mach numbers or for flows near vacuum, solving the conservative Euler equations may generate negative density or internal energy numerically, which may lead to nonlinear instability and crash of the code. This difficulty is particularly profound for high order methods, for multi-material flows and for problems with moving meshes, such as the Lagrangian methods. In this paper, we construct both first order and uniformly high order accurate conservative Lagrangian schemes which preserve positivity of physically positive variables such as density and internal energy in the simulation of compressible multi-material flows with general equations of state (EOS). We first develop a positivity-preserving approximate Riemann solver for the Lagrangian scheme solving compressible Euler equations with both ideal and non ideal EOS. Then we design a class of high order positivity-preserving and conservative Lagrangian schemes by using the essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) reconstruction, the strong stability preserving (SSP) high order time discretizations and the positivity-preserving scaling limiter which can be proven to maintain conservation and uniformly high order accuracy and is easy to implement. One-dimensional and two-dimensional numerical tests for the positivity-preserving Lagrangian schemes are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods.