English

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

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2022-11-04 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

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%95\% for up to 1.2×104\sim 1.2\times10^4 CPUs and excellent weak scaling is shown up to 105\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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.08289,
  title  = {GRAthena++: puncture evolutions on vertex-centered oct-tree AMR},
  author = {Boris Daszuta and Francesco Zappa and William Cook and David Radice and Sebastiano Bernuzzi and Viktoriya Morozova},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.08289},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:21:55.308Z