  This article studies an infinite dimensional analog of Milstein's scheme for
finite dimensional stochastic ordinary differential equations (SODEs). The
Milstein scheme is known to be impressively efficient for SODEs which fulfill a
certain commutativity type condition. This article introduces the infinite
dimensional analog of this commutativity type condition and observes that a
certain class of semilinear stochastic partial differential equation (SPDEs)
with multiplicative trace class noise naturally fulfills the resulting infinite
dimensional commutativity condition. In particular, a suitable infinite
dimensional analog of Milstein's algorithm can be simulated efficiently for
such SPDEs and requires less computational operations and random variables than
previously considered algorithms for simulating such SPDEs. The analysis is
supported by numerical results for a stochastic heat equation and stochastic
reaction diffusion equations showing signifficant computational savings.
