Time-Dilation Methods for Extreme Multiscale Timestepping Problems

Abstract

Many astrophysical simulations involve extreme dynamic range of timescales around 'special points' in the domain (e.g. black holes, stars, planets, disks, galaxies, shocks, mixing interfaces), where processes on small scales couple strongly to those on large scales. Adaptive resolution, multi-physics, and hybrid numerical methods have enabled tremendous progress on the spatial, physics, and numerical challenges involved. But often the limiter for following the long timescales of global evolution is the extremely short numerical timestep required in some subdomains (which leads to their dominating simulation costs). Recently several approaches have been developed for tackling this in problems where the short timescale solution is sampled and then projected as an effective subgrid model over longer timescales (e.g. 'zooming in and out'). We generalize these to a family of models where time evolution is modulated by a variable but continuous in space-and-time dilation/stretch factor $a({\bf x},\,t)$. This extends previous well-studied approaches (including reduced-speed-of-light and binary orbital dynamics methods), and ensures that the system comes to correct local steady-state solutions, and derive criteria that the dilation factor/timesteps/resolution must obey to ensure good behavior. We present a variety of generalizations to different physics or coupling scales. Compared to previous approaches, this method makes it possible to avoid imprinting arbitrary scales where there is no clear scale-separation, and couples well to Lagrangian or Eulerian methods. It is flexible and easily-implemented and we demonstrate its validity (and limitations) in test problems. We discuss the relationship between these methods and physical time dilation in GRMHD. We demonstrate how this can be used to obtain effective speedup factors exceeding $\gtrsim 10^{4}$ in multiphysics simulations.