GR-Athena++: Puncture Evolutions on Vertex-centered Oct-tree Adaptive Mesh Refinement
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.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- DOI:
- 10.3847/1538-4365/ac157b
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2101.08289
- Bibcode:
- 2021ApJS..257...25D
- Keywords:
-
- Black holes;
- Compact objects;
- Astronomy software;
- 162;
- 288;
- 1855;
- General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology;
- Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
- E-Print:
- doi:10.3847/1538-4365/ac157b