GR-Athena++: Puncture evolutions on vertex-centered oct-tree adaptive mesh refinement

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

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

16 Scopus citations

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 multimessenger 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 spacetimes, 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 ∼1.2 × 104 CPUs and excellent weak scaling is shown up to ∼105 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 toward numerical relativity at exascale.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number25
JournalAstrophysical Journal, Supplement Series
Volume257
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2021

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Space and Planetary Science

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