Axisymmetric critical collapse on a shoestring

ABSTRACT:

The study of vacuum critical collapse has acquired an aura of unapproachability in its 30 years of existence. It is often thought that only highly sophisticated numerical methods together with immense supercomputer clusters will suffice for treating this problem. My recently defended PhD thesis questions this folk lore by using only open-source code running on single machines to discover universal echoing in near-critical axisymmetric vacuum spacetimes. In this talk I will discuss my work from the software-development perspective.

I will describe the approaches, tools, and techniques I used to make the most of the limited development manpower and computing resources available to me. Some of these, such as writing assembly code by hand in order to access vector capabilities of modern CPUs, come from my multimedia-software background and are not commonly encountered in physics codes.