208 research outputs found
Cactus: Issues for Sustainable Simulation Software
The Cactus Framework is an open-source, modular, portable programming
environment for the collaborative development and deployment of scientific
applications using high-performance computing. Its roots reach back to 1996 at
the National Center for Supercomputer Applications and the Albert Einstein
Institute in Germany, where its development jumpstarted. Since then, the Cactus
framework has witnessed major changes in hardware infrastructure as well as its
own community. This paper describes its endurance through these past changes
and, drawing upon lessons from its past, also discusses futureComment: submitted to the Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science:
Practice and Experiences 201
Non-symmetric trapped surfaces in the Schwarzschild and Vaidya spacetimes
Marginally trapped surfaces (MTSs) are commonly used in numerical relativity
to locate black holes. For dynamical black holes, it is not known generally if
this procedure is sufficiently reliable. Even for Schwarzschild black holes,
Wald and Iyer constructed foliations which come arbitrarily close to the
singularity but do not contain any MTSs. In this paper, we review the Wald-Iyer
construction, discuss some implications for numerical relativity, and
generalize to the well known Vaidya spacetime describing spherically symmetric
collapse of null dust. In the Vaidya spacetime, we numerically locate
non-spherically symmetric trapped surfaces which extend outside the standard
spherically symmetric trapping horizon. This shows that MTSs are common in this
spacetime and that the event horizon is the most likely candidate for the
boundary of the trapped region.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; v2: minor modifications; v3: clarified
conclusion
Numerical relativity with characteristic evolution, using six angular patches
The characteristic approach to numerical relativity is a useful tool in
evolving gravitational systems. In the past this has been implemented using two
patches of stereographic angular coordinates. In other applications, a
six-patch angular coordinate system has proved effective. Here we investigate
the use of a six-patch system in characteristic numerical relativity, by
comparing an existing two-patch implementation (using second-order finite
differencing throughout) with a new six-patch implementation (using either
second- or fourth-order finite differencing for the angular derivatives). We
compare these different codes by monitoring the Einstein constraint equations,
numerically evaluated independently from the evolution. We find that, compared
to the (second-order) two-patch code at equivalent resolutions, the errors of
the second-order six-patch code are smaller by a factor of about 2, and the
errors of the fourth-order six-patch code are smaller by a factor of nearly 50.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, submitted to CQG (special NFNR issue
Accurate Evolutions of Orbiting Binary Black Holes
We present a detailed analysis of binary black hole evolutions in the last orbit and demonstrate consistent and convergent results for the trajectories of the individual bodies. The gauge choice can significantly affect the overall accuracy of the evolution. It is possible to reconcile certain gauge-dependent discrepancies by examining the convergence limit. We illustrate these results using an initial data set recently evolved by Brügmann et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 211101 (2004)]. For our highest resolution and most accurate gauge, we estimate the duration of this data set's last orbit to be approximately 59MADM
A Massive Data Parallel Computational Framework for Petascale/Exascale Hybrid Computer Systems
Heterogeneous systems are becoming more common on High Performance Computing
(HPC) systems. Even using tools like CUDA and OpenCL it is a non-trivial task
to obtain optimal performance on the GPU. Approaches to simplifying this task
include Merge (a library based framework for heterogeneous multi-core systems),
Zippy (a framework for parallel execution of codes on multiple GPUs), BSGP (a
new programming language for general purpose computation on the GPU) and
CUDA-lite (an enhancement to CUDA that transforms code based on annotations).
In addition, efforts are underway to improve compiler tools for automatic
parallelization and optimization of affine loop nests for GPUs and for
automatic translation of OpenMP parallelized codes to CUDA.
In this paper we present an alternative approach: a new computational
framework for the development of massively data parallel scientific codes
applications suitable for use on such petascale/exascale hybrid systems built
upon the highly scalable Cactus framework. As the first non-trivial
demonstration of its usefulness, we successfully developed a new 3D CFD code
that achieves improved performance.Comment: Parallel Computing 2011 (ParCo2011), 30 August -- 2 September 2011,
Ghent, Belgiu
Neutrino-driven Turbulent Convection and Standing Accretion Shock Instability in Three-Dimensional Core-Collapse Supernovae
We conduct a series of numerical experiments into the nature of
three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamics in the postbounce stalled-shock phase of
core-collapse supernovae using 3D general-relativistic hydrodynamic simulations
of a - progenitor star with a neutrino leakage/heating scheme. We
vary the strength of neutrino heating and find three cases of 3D dynamics: (1)
neutrino-driven convection, (2) initially neutrino-driven convection and
subsequent development of the standing accretion shock instability (SASI), (3)
SASI dominated evolution. This confirms previous 3D results of Hanke et al.
2013, ApJ 770, 66 and Couch & Connor 2014, ApJ 785, 123. We carry out
simulations with resolutions differing by up to a factor of 4 and
demonstrate that low resolution is artificially favorable for explosion in the
3D convection-dominated case, since it decreases the efficiency of energy
transport to small scales. Low resolution results in higher radial convective
fluxes of energy and enthalpy, more fully buoyant mass, and stronger neutrino
heating. In the SASI-dominated case, lower resolution damps SASI oscillations.
In the convection-dominated case, a quasi-stationary angular kinetic energy
spectrum develops in the heating layer. Like other 3D studies, we
find in the "inertial range," while theory and
local simulations argue for . We argue that
current 3D simulations do not resolve the inertial range of turbulence and are
affected by numerical viscosity up to the energy containing scale, creating a
"bottleneck" that prevents an efficient turbulent cascade.Comment: 24 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical
Journal. Added one figure and made minor modifications to text according to
suggestions from the refere
From Physics Model to Results: An Optimizing Framework for Cross-Architecture Code Generation
Starting from a high-level problem description in terms of partial
differential equations using abstract tensor notation, the Chemora framework
discretizes, optimizes, and generates complete high performance codes for a
wide range of compute architectures. Chemora extends the capabilities of
Cactus, facilitating the usage of large-scale CPU/GPU systems in an efficient
manner for complex applications, without low-level code tuning. Chemora
achieves parallelism through MPI and multi-threading, combining OpenMP and
CUDA. Optimizations include high-level code transformations, efficient loop
traversal strategies, dynamically selected data and instruction cache usage
strategies, and JIT compilation of GPU code tailored to the problem
characteristics. The discretization is based on higher-order finite differences
on multi-block domains. Chemora's capabilities are demonstrated by simulations
of black hole collisions. This problem provides an acid test of the framework,
as the Einstein equations contain hundreds of variables and thousands of terms.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Scientific
Programmin
Moving black holes via singularity excision
We present a singularity excision algorithm appropriate for numerical
simulations of black holes moving throughout the computational domain. The
method is an extension of the excision procedure previously used to obtain
stable simulations of single, non-moving black holes. The excision procedure
also shares elements used in recent work to study the dynamics of a scalarfield
in the background of a single, boosted black hole. The robustness of our
excision method is tested with single black-hole evolutions using a coordinate
system in which the coordinate location of the black hole, and thus the
excision boundary, moves throughout the computational domain.Comment: 9 pages and 11 figure
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