Papers › GEAR-RT: Towards Exa-Scale Moment Based Radiative Transfer For Cosmological...
GEAR-RT: Towards Exa-Scale Moment Based Radiative Transfer For Cosmological Simulations Using Task-Based Parallelism And Dynamic Sub-Cycling with SWIFT
Mladen Ivkovic
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
The development and implementation of GEAR-RT, a radiative transfer solver using the M1 closure in the open source code SWIFT, is presented, and validated using standard tests for radiative transfer. GEAR-RT is modeled after RAMSES-RT (Rosdahl et al. 2013) with some key differences. Firstly, while RAMSES-RT uses Finite Volume methods and an Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) strategy, GEAR-RT employs particles as discretization elements and solves the equations using a Finite Volume Particle Method (FVPM). Secondly, GEAR-RT makes use of the task-based parallelization strategy of SWIFT, which allows for optimized load balancing, increased cache efficiency, asynchronous communications, and a domain decomposition based on work rather than on data. GEAR-RT is able to perform sub-cycles of radiative transfer steps w.r.t. a single hydrodynamics step. Radiation requires much smaller time step sizes than hydrodynamics, and sub-cycling permits calculations which are not strictly necessary to be skipped. Indeed, in a test case with gravity, hydrodynamics, and radiative transfer, the sub-cycling is able to reduce the runtime of a simulation by over 90%. Allowing only a part of the involved physics to be sub-cycled is a contrived matter when task-based parallelism is involved, and is an entirely novel feature in SWIFT. Since GEAR-RT uses a FVPM, a detailed introduction into Finite Volume methods and Finite Volume Particle Methods is presented. In astrophysical literature, two FVPM methods are written about: Hopkins (2015) have implemented one in their GIZMO code, while the one mentioned in Ivanova et al. (2013) isn't used to date. In this work, I test an implementation of the Ivanova et al. (2013) version, and conclude that in its current form, it is not suitable for use with particles which are co-moving with the fluid, which in turn is an essential feature for cosmological simulations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections