A Toy Model for Testing Finite Element Methods to Simulate Extreme-Mass-Ratio Binary Systems

Extreme mass ratio binary systems, binaries involving stellar mass objects orbiting massive black holes, are considered to be a primary source of gravitational radiation to be detected by the space-based interferometer LISA. The numerical modelling of these binary systems is extremely challenging because the scales involved expand over several orders of magnitude. One needs to handle large wavelength scales comparable to the size of the massive black hole and, at the same time, to resolve the scales in the vicinity of the small companion where radiation reaction effects play a crucial role. Adaptive finite element methods, in which quantitative control of errors is achieved automatically by finite element mesh adaptivity based on posteriori error estimation, are a natural choice that has great potential for achieving the high level of adaptivity required in these simulations. To demonstrate this, we present the results of simulations of a toy model, consisting of a point-like source orbiting a black hole under the action of a scalar gravitational field.Comment: 29 pages, 37 figures. RevTeX 4.0. Minor changes to match the published versio

Spacetime meshing of stratified spaces for spacetime discontinuous Galerkin methods in arbitrary spatial dimensions

We introduce the spacetime discontinuous Galerkin method and motivate the need for supporting spacetime meshing on meshes comprised of multiple manifolds. We first discuss preliminary concepts behind simplices, simplicial complexes, and the generalization to oriented simplicies. Using these ideas, we define stratified spaces and how they can be used to model a mesh comprised of multiple oriented manifolds. We construct a graphical representation called a Stratified Mesh and use this representation to construct a collection of data structures, the main result being the StratifiedMesh data structure. Next we define a set of support algorithms based on the various data structures discussed. This leads us to review the fundamentals of the TentPitcher algorithm and its relationship to spacetime discontinuous Galerkin methods both theoretically and in the literature. The TentPitcher algorithm is then extended to work on stratified meshes in E^d x R for arbitrary spatial dimension d. We then briefly discuss a parametrization for tentpole vertices that generalizes the baseline TentPitcher, vertex smoothing, and tilted tentpoles. Following that, we discuss at a high level the generic software architecture and techniques used build completely new spacetime meshing software that handles stratified meshes. Visualizations of various examples from the software conclude the work, with examples of single manifold 2d x time, single manifold 3d x time, and a multiple manifold example in 2d x time

Asynchronous parallel solver for hyperbolic problems via the Spacetime Discontinuous Galerkin method

This thesis presents a parallel Space Time Discontinuous Galerkin (SDG) finite element method which makes use of the method's unstructured mesh generation and localized solution technique to achieve a high level of parallel scalability. Our SDG method is different from most traditional adaptive finite element methods in that the solution process generates fully unstructured spacetime grids that satisfy a special causality constraint ensuring that computations can occur locally on small cluster of spacetime elements. The resulting asynchronous solution scheme offers several desirable features: element-wise conservation of solution quantities, strong stability properties without the need for explicit stabilization, local mesh adaptivity operations and linear complexity in the number of spacetime elements. In this thesis we propose an algorithm that effectively parallelizes the Tent Pitcher algorithm developed by [1] using the POSIX Thread (or Pthread) parallel execution model. Multiple software threads can simultaneously and asynchronously perform patch computations by advancing vertices in time. By enforcing the causality constraint on the time step, we can guarantee that each thread only performs calculations using data computed previously. Additionally, improvements to the adaptivity scheme allow for local mesh refinement and coarsening while maintaining globally conforming triangulation. Numerical tests show that our algorithm achieves high parallel scalability using shared-memory parallelization