A simple and efficient solver for self-gravity in the DISPATCH astrophysical simulation framework

Abstract

We describe a simple and effective algorithm for solving Poisson's equation in the context of self-gravity within the DISPATCH astrophysical fluid framework. The algorithm leverages the fact that DISPATCH stores multiple time slices and uses asynchronous time-stepping to produce a scheme that does not require any explicit global communication or sub-cycling, only the normal, local communication between patches and the iterative solution to Poisson's equation. We demonstrate that the implementation is suitable for both collections of patches of a single resolution and for hierarchies of adaptively resolved patches. Benchmarks are presented that demonstrate the accuracy, effectiveness and efficiency of the scheme.