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Abelian-Higgs cosmic string evolution with multiple GPUs

J. R. C. C. C. Correia, C. J. A. P. Martins

Abstract
Topological defects form at cosmological phase transitions by the Kibble mechanism. Cosmic strings and superstrings can lead to particularly interesting astrophysical and cosmological consequences, but this study is currently limited by the availability of accurate numerical simulations, which in turn is bottlenecked by hardware resources and computation time. Aiming to eliminate this bottleneck, in recent work we introduced and validated a GPU-accelerated evolution code for local Abelian-Higgs strings networks. While this leads to significant gains in speed, it is still limited by the physical memory available on a graphical accelerator. Here we report on a further step towards our main goal, by implementing and validating a multiple GPU extension of the earlier code, and further demonstrate its good scalability, both in terms of strong and weak scaling. A 81923 production run, using 4096 GPUs, runs in 33.2 min of wall-clock time on the Piz Daint supercomputer.

Keywords
Cosmology: topological defects; Field theory simulations; Cosmic string networks; Methods: numerical; Methods: GPU computing; Physics - Computational Physics; Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Acta Astronautica
Volume 34, Number 1004
2021 January

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Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa Universidade do Porto Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia COMPETE 2020 PORTUGAL 2020 União Europeia