Collaborative Research: Accelerating the Pace of Discovery in Numerical Relativity by Improving Computational Efficiency and Scalability

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The dawn of gravitational wave astronomy is just beginning, and the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors have already made some stunning discoveries. Future upgrades to these detectors, as well as the advent of new detectors, such as Kagra, will significantly expand the range of gravitational wave science. As the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors improves over the next decade, the accuracy of numerical solutions of these events must correspondingly increase by at least an order of magnitude in the same time frame. This is a significant computational challenge that must be met to enable the full scientific potential of the new detectors. This project will study mergers of binary neutron stars and black holes using computer simulations created by Dendro-GR, a new computer code that runs very efficiently on the largest supercomputers. Tests of general relativity will also be performed by examining alternative models of gravity. New algorithms for solving differential equations will be explored to improve the efficiency of long simulations of binary mergers. Work done for this project will promote the progress of science and contribute to undergraduate and graduate training in multiple STEM fields including computer science, mathematics, and physics. Finally, Dendro-GR is an open source project.This project will study the dynamics of merging binary compact objects at the frontier of current computational capabilities. The ability to model a wide variety of possible mergers will correspondingly increase the ability of gravitational wave scientists to find and understand these high-energy events, and to search for possible new physics that lies beyond our current gravitational models. This project will be directed at the following goals: (1) The Dendro-GR computational framework will be expanded to calculate gravitational waveforms for binary neutron star inspirals of sufficient accuracy to be used in waveform catalogs. (2) Binary black hole inspirals with large mass ratios will be studied to expand the range of current waveform catalogs. (3) Gravitational waveforms for merging black hole binaries will be calculated within alternative gravitational theories to probe possible deviations from the predictions of general relativity and to search for new physics beyond our current model for gravity. (4) The computational challenge of improving accuracy in numerical relativity will be studied by focusing on reducing the time-to-solution. This complicated problem requires a broad approach that uses GPUs, innovative finite differencing, improved spatial discretizations, and exposing the temporal discretization to more parallelism.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.