GRACE: An Open-Source Framework for GPU-Accelerated Numerical Relativity
Carlo Musolino, Christian Ecker, Konrad Topolski, Marie Cassing, Keneth Miler, Harry Ho-Yin Ng, Khalil Pierre, Elias R. Most, Luciano Rezzolla
gr-qc, astro-ph.HE
Submitted: 2026-07-10
Code: https://github.com/GRACE-astro/grace
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We present GRACE, a new GPU-accelerated numerical-relativity framework designed to run efficiently on heterogeneous high-performance computing platforms.
Terminology
Abstract
We present GRACE, a new GPU-accelerated numerical-relativity framework designed to run efficiently on heterogeneous high-performance computing platforms. Developed from scratch and built exclusively on open-source libraries, GRACE employs Kokkos for performance portability across CPU and GPU architectures and p4est for adaptive mesh refinement. The code evolves the equations of ideal GRMHD -- with divergence-free magnetic fields maintained by constrained transport -- self-consistently coupled to the Einstein equations in the Z4c formulation, on fixed or adaptively refined grids. We validate the implementation against a suite of standard tests, ranging from magnetized shock tubes and the magnetic rotor in flat spacetime, through (magnetized) Bondi accretion onto a Schwarzschild black hole and the ringdown of a perturbed spinning puncture, to neutron-star oscillation spectra in fixed and dynamical spacetimes and the merger of binary black holes. As more demanding applications, we evolve two binary neutron-star mergers -- an equal-mass, unmagnetized system with an ideal-gas equation of state and an unequal-mass, magnetized system with a finite-temperature tabulated equation of state -- finding the inspiral dynamics to agree well with the FIL code. We also report single-device throughput together with strong- and weak-scaling results on multiple GPU and CPU architectures. GRACE is publicly released together with GRACEpy, a basic post-processing and data-analysis environment.
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