An improved dynamical Poisson equation solver for self-gravity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since self-gravity is crucial in the structure formation of the Universe, many hydrodynamics simulations with the effect of self-gravity have been conducted. The multigrid method is widely used as a solver for the Poisson equation of the self-gravity; however, the parallelization efficiency of the multigrid method becomes worse when we use a massively parallel computer, and it becomes inefficient with more than 104 cores, even for highly tuned codes. To perform large-scale parallel simulations (>104 cores), developing a new gravity solver with good parallelization efficiency is beneficial. In this article, we develop a new self-gravity solver using the telegraph equation with a damping coefficient, κ. Parallelization is much easier than the case of the elliptic Poisson equation since the telegraph equation is a hyperbolic partial differential equation. We analyse convergence tests of our telegraph equations solver and determine that the best non-dimensional damping coefficient of the telegraph equations is $\tilde{\kappa } \simeq 2.5$. We also show that our method can maintain high parallelization efficiency even for massively parallel computations due to the hyperbolic nature of the telegraphic equation by weak-scaling tests. If the time-step of the calculation is determined by heating/cooling or chemical reactions, rather than the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy (CFL) condition, our method may provide the method for calculating self-gravity faster than other previously known methods such as the fast Fourier transform and multigrid iteration solvers because gravitational phase velocity determined by the CFL condition using these time-scales is much larger than the fluid velocity plus sound speed.