grim: A Flexible, Conservative Scheme for Relativistic Fluid Theories

Hot, diffuse, relativistic plasmas such as sub-Eddington black hole accretion flows are expected to be collisionless, yet are commonly modeled as a fluid using ideal general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD). Dissipative effects such as heat conduction and viscosity can be important in a collisionless plasma and will potentially alter the dynamics and radiative properties of the flow from that in ideal fluid models; we refer to models that include these processes as Extended GRMHD. Here we describe a new conservative code, grim, that enables all the above and additional physics to be efficiently incorporated. grim combines time evolution and primitive variable inversion needed for conservative schemes into a single step using an algorithm that only requires the residuals of the governing equations as inputs. This algorithm enables the code to be physics agnostic as well as flexibility regarding time-stepping schemes. grim runs on CPUs, as well as on GPUs, using the same code. We formulate a performance model, and use it to show that our implementation runs optimally on both architectures. General Relativistic Implicit Magnetohydrodynamics: http://github.com/afd-illinois/grim