preCICE time step setting for parallel-explicit coupling scheme

Hello, everyone!

In my recent projects, I have successfully employed preCICE for the coupling of two self-programming solvers in a serial coupling scheme. To improve computational efficiency, I am currently exploring the use of a parallel-explicit coupling scheme with preCICE. However, I have encountered a limitation where the parallel scheme appears to support only fixed time window.

Our objective is to implement an adaptive time window in the parallel coupling scheme. I would like to inquire whether preCICE currently supports this feature. If not, I am interested in understanding the feasibility and potential challenges associated with developing this feature.

I would appreciate it if you could provide some insights or guidance on this matter, your expertise would be invaluable!

Hi @Jian,

do you mean adapting how often the participants are coupling to each other, during the simulation? This is currently not supported by preCICE, nor planned. What would be your use case?

What you need might be provided by different features, though:

  • subcycling: the two participants don’t need to couple their every time step. You can have smaller and different time step sizes in each participant.
  • time interpolation: while participants exchange information once per coupling time window, they can exchange more than one time sample, creating an interpolation function that in the end allows for higher-order convergence.