GAMER with out-of-core computation

GAMER is a GPU-accelerated Adaptive-MEsh-Refinement code for astrophysical simulations. In this work, two further extensions of the code are reported. First, we have implemented the MUSCL-Hancock method with the Roe’s Riemann solver for the hydrodynamic evolution, by which the accuracy, overall performance and the GPU versus CPU speed-up factor are improved. Second, we have implemented the out-of-core computation, which utilizes the large storage space of multiple hard disks as the additional run-time virtual memory and permits an extremely large problem to be solved in a relatively small-size GPU cluster. The communication overhead associated with the data transfer between the parallel hard disks and the main memory is carefully reduced by overlapping it with the CPU/GPU computations.