Abelian–Higgs cosmic string evolution with multiple GPUs

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.