Accelerating numerical relativity simulations with new multistep fourth-order Runge–Kutta methods

Abstract Many HPC applications that solve differential equations rely on the Runge–Kutta (RK) family of methods for time integration . Among these methods, the fourth-order accurate RK4 scheme is especially popular. This time integration scheme requires applications to evaluate four intermediate stages to take one time step. Depending on the complexity of the problem being solved, the evaluation of these intermediate stages can be computationally expensive. In this paper we develop explicit fourth-order accurate multistep RK methods. The advantage of such methods is that they re-use data from previous time steps, thus requiring fewer intermediate stage evaluations and potentially speeding up applications. We outline a procedure to obtain and tune the method’s coefficients by adjusting their stability regions in an attempt to maximize the size that a time step can take. We validate and evaluate our new methods in the context of numerical relativity applications using the EinsteinToolkit . We believe, however, that these methods and results should generalize to other applications using explicit RK methods.