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arXiv · 2101.08289

GRAthena++: puncture evolutions on vertex-centered oct-tree AMR

Boris Daszuta·Francesco Zappa·William Cook·David Radice·Sebastiano Bernuzzi·Viktoriya Morozova
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Abstract

Numerical relativity is central to the investigation of astrophysical sources in the dynamical and strong-field gravity regime, such as binary black hole and neutron star coalescences. Current challenges set by gravitational-wave and multi-messenger astronomy call for highly performant and scalable codes on modern massively-parallel architectures. We present GR-Athena++, a general-relativistic, high-order, vertex-centered solver that extends the oct-tree, adaptive mesh refinement capabilities of the astrophysical (radiation) magnetohydrodynamics code Athena++. To simulate dynamical space-times GR-Athena++ uses the Z4c evolution scheme of numerical relativity coupled to the moving puncture gauge. We demonstrate stable and accurate binary black hole merger evolutions via extensive convergence testing, cross-code validation, and verification against state-of-the-art effective-one-body waveforms. GR-Athena++ leverages the task-based parallelism paradigm of Athena++ to achieve excellent scalability. We measure strong scaling efficiencies above $95\%$ for up to $\sim 1.2\times10^4$ CPUs and excellent weak scaling is shown up to $\sim 10^5$ CPUs in a production binary black hole setup with adaptive mesh refinement. GR-Athena++ thus allows for the robust simulation of compact binary coalescences and offers a viable path towards numerical relativity at exascale.

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Boris Daszuta, Francesco Zappa, William Cook, David Radice, Sebastiano Bernuzzi, Viktoriya Morozova. 2021-01-20. GRAthena++: puncture evolutions on vertex-centered oct-tree AMR. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365%2Fac157b

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