Summary of Nonlinear Solvers Available In PETSc

See the paper Composing Scalable Nonlinear Algebraic Solvers or the PETSc users manual for details on the algorithms.

Algorithm

Associated Type

Notes

Newton’s method

SNESNEWTONLS

Use -snes_mf for matrix-free linear solvers

Newton’s method with trust region

SNESNEWTONTR

Single linearization

SNESKSPONLY

Essentially one step of Newtwon without a line search

Quasi-Newton method (BFGS)

SNESQN

Nonlinear CG

SNESNCG

Requires nearly symmetric Jacobian for good convergence

Nonlinear GMRES

SNESNGMRES

Anderson mixing

SNESANDERSON

Nonlinear Richardson

SNESNRICHARDSON

Nonlinear Gauss-Siedel

SNESNGS

Full Approximation Scheme (nonlinear multigrid)

SNESFAS

Nonlinear additive Schwarz

SNESNASM

Nonlinear additive Schwarz preconditioned inexact Newton (ASPIN) methods

SNESASPIN

Composite (combine several nonlinear solvers)

SNESCOMPOSITE

Preconditioned nonlinear solver

See SNESGetNPC()/ SNESSetNPC(), can be combined to accelerate many of the solvers