Supersonic turbulence simulations with GPU-based high-order Discontinuous Galerkin hydrodynamics

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Main Authors: Cernetic, Miha, Springel, Volker, Guillet, Thomas, Pakmor, Rüdiger
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cernetic, Miha
Springel, Volker
Guillet, Thomas
Pakmor, Rüdiger
author_facet Cernetic, Miha
Springel, Volker
Guillet, Thomas
Pakmor, Rüdiger
contents We investigate the numerical performance of a Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) hydrodynamics implementation when applied to the problem of driven, isothermal supersonic turbulence. While the high-order element-based spectral approach of DG is known to efficiently produce accurate results for smooth problems (exponential convergence with expansion order), physical discontinuities in solutions, like shocks, prove challenging and may significantly diminish DG's applicability to practical astrophysical applications. We consider whether DG is able to retain its accuracy and stability for highly supersonic turbulence, characterized by a network of shocks. We find that our new implementation, which regularizes shocks at sub-cell resolution with artificial viscosity, still performs well compared to standard second-order schemes for moderately high Mach number turbulence, provided we also employ an additional projection of the primitive variables onto the polynomial basis to regularize the extrapolated values at cell interfaces. However, the accuracy advantage of DG diminishes significantly in the highly supersonic regime. Nevertheless, in turbulence simulations with a wide dynamic range that start with supersonic Mach numbers and can resolve the sonic point, the low numerical dissipation of DG schemes still proves advantageous in the subsonic regime. Our results thus support the practical applicability of DG schemes for demanding astrophysical problems that involve strong shocks and turbulence, such as star formation in the interstellar medium. We also discuss the substantial computational cost of DG when going to high order, which needs to be weighted against the resulting accuracy gain. For problems containing shocks, this favours the use of comparatively low DG order.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_06841
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Supersonic turbulence simulations with GPU-based high-order Discontinuous Galerkin hydrodynamics
Cernetic, Miha
Springel, Volker
Guillet, Thomas
Pakmor, Rüdiger
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Fluid Dynamics
We investigate the numerical performance of a Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) hydrodynamics implementation when applied to the problem of driven, isothermal supersonic turbulence. While the high-order element-based spectral approach of DG is known to efficiently produce accurate results for smooth problems (exponential convergence with expansion order), physical discontinuities in solutions, like shocks, prove challenging and may significantly diminish DG's applicability to practical astrophysical applications. We consider whether DG is able to retain its accuracy and stability for highly supersonic turbulence, characterized by a network of shocks. We find that our new implementation, which regularizes shocks at sub-cell resolution with artificial viscosity, still performs well compared to standard second-order schemes for moderately high Mach number turbulence, provided we also employ an additional projection of the primitive variables onto the polynomial basis to regularize the extrapolated values at cell interfaces. However, the accuracy advantage of DG diminishes significantly in the highly supersonic regime. Nevertheless, in turbulence simulations with a wide dynamic range that start with supersonic Mach numbers and can resolve the sonic point, the low numerical dissipation of DG schemes still proves advantageous in the subsonic regime. Our results thus support the practical applicability of DG schemes for demanding astrophysical problems that involve strong shocks and turbulence, such as star formation in the interstellar medium. We also discuss the substantial computational cost of DG when going to high order, which needs to be weighted against the resulting accuracy gain. For problems containing shocks, this favours the use of comparatively low DG order.
title Supersonic turbulence simulations with GPU-based high-order Discontinuous Galerkin hydrodynamics
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Fluid Dynamics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.06841