arXiv subjects

Rubén M. Cabezón

Publications and source records attributed to Rubén M. Cabezón.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From particles to precision. Simulating subsonic turbulence with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

The numerical simulation of subsonic turbulence with smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) has traditionally been hampered by zeroth-order (E0) errors, inaccurate gradient evaluations, and excessive numerical dissipation. We aim to investigate whether a modern SPH formulation can overcome these challenges by comparing its results to those obtained using moving-mesh and meshless finite-volume methods such as AREPO and GIZMO. For this purpose, we used SPH-EXA, a highly scalable, natively GPU-accelerated, state-of-the-art SPH code. Our results show that SPH-EXA accurately reproduces the Kolmogorov inertial range scaling in the subsonic regime with increasing resolution, closely matching the results of the reference methods. We also identify accurate grad-h terms as critical: a noisy standard implementation can imprint spurious granulation in the density field once dissipation is sufficiently reduced. These results demonstrate that, with appropriate methodological advances, SPH can achieve a level of fidelity in modeling subsonic turbulence comparable to the most advanced Eulerian and moving-mesh approaches.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2026

Are heuristic switches necessary to control dissipation in modern smoothed particle hydrodynamics ?

Artificial viscosity is commonly employed in smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to model dissipation in hydrodynamic simulations. However, its practical implementation today relies, in many cases, on complex numerical switches to restrict its application to regions where dissipation is physically warranted, such as shocks. These switches, while essential, are imperfect and can introduce additional numerical noise. In this work we develop and validate a more efficient shock capture scheme for SPH that does not rely on artificial viscosity switches. Recent studies have proposed that subtracting the linear component of the velocity field can suppress spurious dissipation in shear-dominated regions. Building on this idea, we implement a velocity-reconstruction technique that removes the bulk linear motion from the local velocity field and uses the Balsara correction to modulate the dissipation. The presented methodology yields a balanced dissipation scheme that performs well across a range of regimes, including subsonic instabilities, shear flows, and strong shocks. We demonstrate that this approach yields improved accuracy and lower spurious dissipation, compared to the reference viscosity switch used in this work.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2024

Do not forget the electrons: Extending moderately-sized nuclear networks for multidimensional hydrodynamic codes

We present here an extended nuclear network, with 90 species, designed for being coupled with hydrodynamic simulations, which includes neutrons, protons, electrons, positrons, and the corresponding neutrino and anti-neutrino emission. This network is also coupled with temperature, making it extremely robust and, together with its size, unique of its kind. The inclusion of electron captures on free protons makes the network very appropriate for multidimensional studies of Type Ia supernova explosions, especially when the exploding object is a massive white dwarf. The results obtained with the proposed medium-sized network compare fairly well, to a few percent, with those computed with the extended network WinNet (> 2000 isotopes) in scenarios reproducing the gross physical conditions of current Type Ia supernova explosion models. In those cases where the carbon and oxygen fuel ignites at high density, the high-temperature plateau typical of the nuclear statistical equilibrium regime is well defined and stable, allowing large integration time steps. We show that the inclusion of electron captures on free protons substantially improves the estimation of the electron fraction of the mixture. Therefore, the pressure is better determined than in networks where electron captures are excluded, which will ultimately lead to more reliable hydrodynamic models. Explosive combustion of helium at low density, occurring near the surface layer of a white dwarf, is also better described with the proposed network, which gives nuclear energy generation rates much closer to WinNet than typical reduced alpha networks.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2024

Mixing Sinc kernels to improve interpolations in smoothed particle hydrodynamics without pairing instability

The smoothed particle hydrodynamic technique is strongly based on the proper choice of interpolation functions. This statement is particularly relevant for the study of subsonic fluxes and turbulence, where inherent small errors in the averaging procedures introduce excessive damping on the smallest scales. To mitigate these errors we can increase both the number of interpolating points and the order of the interpolating kernel function. However, this approach leads to a higher computational burden across all fluid regions. Ideally, the development of a single kernel function capable of effectively accommodating varying numbers of interpolating points in different fluid regions, providing good resolution and minimal errors would be highly desirable. In this work, we revisit and extend the main properties of a family of interpolators called $Sinc~kernels$ and compare them with the widely used family of Wendland kernels. We show that a linear combination of low- and high-order Sinc kernels generates good-quality interpolators, which are resistant to pairing instability while maintaining good sampling properties in a wide range of neighbor interpolating points, $60\le n_b\le 400$. We show that a particular case of this linear mix of Sincs produces a well-balanced and robust kernel that improves previous results in the Gresho-Chan vortex experiment even when the number of neighbors is not large, while yielding a good convergence rate. Although such a mixing technique is ideally suited for Sinc kernels owing to their excellent flexibility, it can be easily applied to other interpolating families such as the B-splines and Wendland kernels.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2022

Axisymmetric smoothed particle magneto-hydrodynamics

Many astrophysical and terrestrial scenarios involving magnetic fields can be approached in axial geometry. Although the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique has been successfully extended to magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD), a well-verified, axisymmetric MHD scheme based on such technique does not exist yet. In this work we fill that gap in the scientific literature and propose and check a novel axisymmetric MHD hydrodynamic code, that can be applied to physical problems which display the adequate geometry. We show that the hydrodynamic code built following these axisymmetric hypothesis is able to produce similar results than standard 3D-SPMHD codes with equivalent resolution but with much lesser computational load.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2022

Sub-stellar engulfment by a main sequence star: where is the lithium?

In this work, we study whether the engulfment of a brown dwarf (BD) by a solar-like main-sequence (MS) star can significantly alter the structure of the star and the Li content on its surface. We perform 3D Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations of the engulfment of a BD with masses 0.01 and 0.019 Msun, onto an MS star of 1 Msun and solar composition, in three different scenarios: a head-on collision, a grazing collision, and a merger. We study the dynamics of the interaction in detail, and the relevance of the type of interaction and the mass of the BD on the final fate of the sub-stellar object and the host star in terms of mass loss of the system, angular momentum transfer, and changes in the Li abundance in the surface of the host star. We found that most of the BD mass is diluted in the denser region of the MS star. Only in the merger scenario a significant fraction (40%) of the BD material would remain in the outer layers. We find a clear increase in the surface rotational velocity of the host star after the interaction, ranging between 25 km/s (grazing collision) to 50 km/s (merger). We also find a significant mass loss from the system (1e-4 - 1e-3 Msun) due to the engulfment, which in the case of the merger, may form a circumstellar disk-like structure. Assuming that neither the depth of the convective envelope of the host star nor its mass content are modified during the interaction, a small change in the surface Li abundance in the head-on and grazing collisions is found. However, in the merger we find large Li enhancements, by factors 20-30, depending on the BD mass. Some of these features could be detected observationally in the host star provide they remain long enough time.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2022

Axisymmetric magneto-hydrodynamics with SPH

Many interesting terrestrial and astrophysical scenarios involving magnetic fields can be approached in axial geometry. Even though the Lagrangian smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique has been successfully extended to handle magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) problems, a well-verified, axisymmetric MHD scheme based on the SPH technique does not exist. In this work, we propose and check a new axisymmetric MHD hydrodynamic code that can be applied to astrophysical and engineering problems which display an adequate geometry. We show that a hydrodynamic code built on these axisymmetric premises is able to produce similar results to standard 3D-SPHMHD codes but with much lesser computational effort.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2022

Conservative, density-based smoothed particle hydrodynamics with improved partition of the unity and better estimation of gradients

The correct evaluation of gradients is at the cornerstone of the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique. Using an integral approach to estimate gradients has proven to enhance accuracy substantially. Such approach retains the Lagrangian structure of SPH equations and is fully conservative. But, in practice, it is difficult to make the Lagrangian formulation totally consistent to an exact partition of the unity. In this paper we study, among other things, the connection between the choice of the volume elements (VEs), which enters in the SPH summations, and the accuracy in the gradient estimation within the integral approach scheme (ISPH). A new variant of VEs are proposed which improve the partition of the unity and is fully compatible with the Lagrangian formulation of SPH, including the grad-h corrections. Using analytic considerations, simple static toy models in 1D, and a few full 3D test cases, we show that any improvement in the partition of the unity also leads to a better calculation of gradients when the integral approach is used jointly. Additionally, we propose an easy-to-implement modification of the ISPH scheme, which makes it more flexible and better suited to handle sharp density contrasts. The ISPH code built with the proposed scheme has been validated with a good number of standard tests, some of them involving contact discontinuities. The performance of the code was excellent in all of them, showing that an improvement in the partition of the unity is not detrimental of the good conservation of energy, momentum, and entropy typical of Lagrangian schemes.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2020

Finding Neighbors in a Forest: A b-tree for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulations

Finding the exact close neighbors of each fluid element in mesh-free computational hydrodynamical methods, such as the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), often becomes a main bottleneck for scaling their performance beyond a few million fluid elements per computing node. Tree structures are particularly suitable for SPH simulation codes, which rely on finding the exact close neighbors of each fluid element (or SPH particle). In this work we present a novel tree structure, named \textit{$b$-tree}, which features an adaptive branching factor to reduce the depth of the neighbor search. Depending on the particle spatial distribution, finding neighbors using \tree has an asymptotic best case complexity of $O(n)$, as opposed to $O(n \log n)$ for other classical tree structures such as octrees and quadtrees. We also present the proposed tree structure as well as the algorithms to build it and to find the exact close neighbors of all particles. We assess the scalability of the proposed tree-based algorithms through an extensive set of performance experiments in a shared-memory system. Results show that b-tree is up to $12\times$ faster for building the tree and up to $1.6\times$ faster for finding the exact neighbors of all particles when compared to its octree form. Moreover, we apply b-tree to a SPH code and show its usefulness over the existing octree implementation, where b-tree is up to $5\times$ faster for finding the exact close neighbors compared to the legacy code.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Mini-App for Exascale

The Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a particle-based, meshfree, Lagrangian method used to simulate multidimensional fluids with arbitrary geometries, most commonly employed in astrophysics, cosmology, and computational fluid-dynamics (CFD). It is expected that these computationally-demanding numerical simulations will significantly benefit from the up-and-coming Exascale computing infrastructures, that will perform 10 18 FLOP/s. In this work, we review the status of a novel SPH-EXA mini-app, which is the result of an interdisciplinary co-design project between the fields of astrophysics, fluid dynamics and computer science, whose goal is to enable SPH simulations to run on Exascale systems. The SPH-EXA mini-app merges the main characteristics of three state-of-the-art parent SPH codes (namely ChaNGa, SPH-flow, SPHYNX) with state-of-the-art (parallel) programming, optimization, and parallelization methods. The proposed SPH-EXA mini-app is a C++14 lightweight and flexible header-only code with no external software dependencies. Parallelism is expressed via multiple programming models, which can be chosen at compilation time with or without accelerator support, for a hybrid process+thread+accelerator configuration. Strong and weak-scaling experiments on a production supercomputer show that the SPH-EXA mini-app can be efficiently executed with up 267 million particles and up to 65 billion particles in total on 2,048 hybrid CPU-GPU nodes.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2020

Self-gravitating barotropic equilibrium configurations of rotating bodies with SPH

We present a novel relaxation method to build three-dimensional rotating structures of barotropic bodies using the SPH technique. The method is able to relax gaseous structures in rigid as well as differential rotation. The relaxation procedure strongly relies on the excellent conservation of angular momentum that characterizes the SPH technique. The method has been successfully applied to a variety of zero-temperature white dwarfs and polytropic self-gravitating structures. Our SPH results have been validated by comparing the main features (energies, central densities and the polar to equatorial radius ratio) to those obtained with independent, albeit grid-based methods, as for example, the self-consistent field method, showing that both methods agree within few percents.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2019

SPH-EXA: Enhancing the Scalability of SPH codes Via an Exascale-Ready SPH Mini-App

Numerical simulations of fluids in astrophysics and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are among the most computationally-demanding calculations, in terms of sustained floating-point operations per second, or FLOP/s. It is expected that these numerical simulations will significantly benefit from the future Exascale computing infrastructures, that will perform 10^18 FLOP/s. The performance of the SPH codes is, in general, adversely impacted by several factors, such as multiple time-stepping, long-range interactions, and/or boundary conditions. In this work an extensive study of three SPH implementations SPHYNX, ChaNGa, and XXX is performed, to gain insights and to expose any limitations and characteristics of the codes. These codes are the starting point of an interdisciplinary co-design project, SPH-EXA, for the development of an Exascale-ready SPH mini-app. We implemented a rotating square patch as a joint test simulation for the three SPH codes and analyzed their performance on a modern HPC system, Piz Daint. The performance profiling and scalability analysis conducted on the three parent codes allowed to expose their performance issues, such as load imbalance, both in MPI and OpenMP. Two-level load balancing has been successfully applied to SPHYNX to overcome its load imbalance. The performance analysis shapes and drives the design of the SPH-EXA mini-app towards the use of efficient parallelization methods, fault-tolerance mechanisms, and load balancing approaches.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2019

Detection of Silent Data Corruptions in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulations

Silent data corruptions (SDCs) hinder the correctness of long-running scientific applications on large scale computing systems. Selective particle replication (SPR) is proposed herein as the first particle-based replication method for detecting SDCs in Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. SPH is a mesh-free Lagrangian method commonly used to perform hydrodynamical simulations in astrophysics and computational fluid dynamics. SPH performs interpolation of physical properties over neighboring discretization points (called SPH particles) that dynamically adapt their distribution to the mass density field of the fluid. When a fault (e.g., a bit-flip) strikes the computation or the data associated with a particle, the resulting error is silently propagated to all nearest neighbors through such interpolation steps. SPR replicates the computation and data of a few carefully selected SPH particles. SDCs are detected when the data of a particle differs, due to corruption, from its replicated counterpart. SPR is able to detect many DRAM SDCs as they propagate by ensuring that all particles have at least one neighbor that is replicated. The detection capabilities of SPR were assessed through a set of error-injection and detection experiments and the overhead of SPR was evaluated via a set of strong-scaling experiments conducted on an HPC system. The results show that SPR achieves detection rates of 91-99.9%, no false-positives, at an overhead of 1-10%.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

Core-collapse supernovae in the hall of mirrors. A three-dimensional code-comparison project

Modeling core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) with neutrino transport in three dimensions (3D) requires tremendous computing resources and some level of approximation. We present a first comparison study of CCSNe in 3D with different physics approximations and hydrodynamics codes. We aim to assess the impact of the hydrodynamics code, approximations for the neutrino and gravity treatments, and rotation on the simulation of CCSNe in 3D. We use four different hydrodynamics codes in this work (ELEPHANT, FLASH, fGR1, and SPHYNX) in combination with two different neutrino treatments, the isotropic diffusion source approximation (IDSA) and two-moment M1, and three different gravity treatments: Newtonian, 1D General Relativity (GR) correction, and full GR). Additional parameters discussed in this study are the inclusion of neutrino-electron scattering via a parametrized deleptonization (PD) and the influence of rotation. The four codes compared in this work include Eulerian and fully Lagrangian (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) codes for the first time. They show agreement in the overall evolution of the collapse phase and early post-bounce within the range of 10% (20% in some cases). The comparison of the different neutrino treatments highlights the need to further investigate the antineutrino luminosities in IDSA, which tend to be relatively high. We also demonstrate the requirement for a more detailed heavy-lepton neutrino leakage. When comparing with a full GR code, including an M1 transport method, we confirm the influence of neutrino-electron scattering during the collapse phase, which is adequately captured by the PD scheme. Also, the effective GR potential reproduces the overall dynamic evolution correctly in all Newtonian codes. Additionally, we verify that rotation aids the shock expansion and estimate the overall angular momentum losses for each code in rotating scenarios.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2018

Towards a Mini-App for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics at Exascale

The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique is a purely Lagrangian method, used in numerical simulations of fluids in astrophysics and computational fluid dynamics, among many other fields. SPH simulations with detailed physics represent computationally-demanding calculations. The parallelization of SPH codes is not trivial due to the absence of a structured grid. Additionally, the performance of the SPH codes can be, in general, adversely impacted by several factors, such as multiple time-stepping, long-range interactions, and/or boundary conditions. This work presents insights into the current performance and functionalities of three SPH codes: SPHYNX, ChaNGa, and SPH-flow. These codes are the starting point of an interdisciplinary co-design project, SPH-EXA, for the development of an Exascale-ready SPH mini-app. To gain such insights, a rotating square patch test was implemented as a common test simulation for the three SPH codes and analyzed on two modern HPC systems. Furthermore, to stress the differences with the codes stemming from the astrophysics community (SPHYNX and ChaNGa), an additional test case, the Evrard collapse, has also been carried out. This work extrapolates the common basic SPH features in the three codes for the purpose of consolidating them into a pure-SPH, Exascale-ready, optimized, mini-app. Moreover, the outcome of this serves as direct feedback to the parent codes, to improve their performance and overall scalability.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2018

Surface and core detonations in rotating white dwarfs

The feasibility of the Double Detonation mechanism, -a surface Helium-detonation followed by the complete carbon detonation of the core-, in a rotating white dwarf with a mass $\simeq 1 M_{\odot}$ is studied using three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations. Assuming rigid rotation, the rotational speed is taken high enough as to considerably distort the initial spherical geometry of the white dwarf. Unlike spherically symmetric models, we found that when helium ignition is located far from the spinning axis the detonation fronts converge asynchronically at the antipodes of the igniting point. Nevertheless, the detonation of the carbon core still remains as the most probable outcome. The detonation of the core gives rise to a strong explosion, matching many of the basic observational constraints of Type Ia Supernova. We conclude that the Double Detonation mechanism also works when the white dwarf is spinning fast. This confirms the sub-Chandrasekhar-mass models and, maybe some Double Degenerate models (those having some helium fuel at the merging moment), as appealing channels to produce Type Ia Supernova events.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2014

Equalizing resolution in smoothed-particle hydrodynamics calculations using self-adaptive sinc kernels

The smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique is a numerical method for solving gas-dynamical problems. It has been applied to simulate the evolution of a wide variety of astrophysical systems. The method has a second-order accuracy, with a resolution that is usually much higher in the compressed regions than in the diluted zones of the fluid. In this work, we propose and check a scheme to balance and equalize the resolution of SPH between high- and low-density regions. This method relies on the versatility of a family of interpolators called Sinc kernels, which allows increasing the interpolation quality by varying only a single parameter (the exponent of the Sinc function). The scheme is checked and validated through a number of numerical tests, from standard one-dimensional Riemann problems in shock tubes, to multidimensional simulations of explosions, hydrodynamic instabilities and the collapse of a sun-like polytrope. The analysis of the hydrodynamical simulations suggests that the scheme devised to equalizing accuracy improves the treatment of the post-shock regions and, in general, of the rarefacted zones of fluids while causing no harm to the growth of hydrodynamic instabilities. The method is robust and easy to implement with a low computational overload. It conserves mass, energy, and momentum and reduces to the standard SPH scheme in regions of the fluid that have smooth density gradients.

astro-ph.IM↗