Heritage of the Black Hole Accretion Code

Project

BHAC was initiated as part of the ERC Synergy grant ''BlacHoleCam' by Oliver Porth and the BHAC development team Hector Olivares, Yosuke Mizuno, Ziri Younsi, Luciano Rezzolla, Elias Most, Bart Ripperda and Fabio Bacchini
“BlackHoleCam: Imaging the Event Horizon of Black Holes" (Grant No. 610058), PI: H. Falcke, M. Kramer, L. Rezzolla.
The main publications of this release version are:

1. `The black hole accretion code`, Porth, O.; Olivares, H.; Mizuno, Y.; Younsi, Z.; Rezzolla, L.; Moscibrodzka, M.; Falcke, H. and Kramer, M.; Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology, 2017, 4, 1
2. `Constrained transport and adaptive mesh refinement in the Black Hole Accretion Code`, Hector Olivares, Oliver Porth, Jordy Davelaar, Elias R. Most, Christian M. Fromm, Yosuke Mizuno , Ziri Younsi and Luciano Rezzolla; A and A, 629, A61, 2019

BHAC is build upon the MPI-AMRVAC software framework (current release at amrvac.org) and could not exist without it. We would like to give credit to all contributors leading up to MPI-AMRVAC version 1.0:
This version of the MPI-AMRVAC software was initiated in the course of 2006-2007 by Bart van der Holst (meanwhile at University of Michigan) in a close collaboration with Rony Keppens at the Centre for Plasma-Astrophysics (CPA) at K.U.Leuven. The code has witnessed continuous improvements and additions, with Zakaria Meliani as the main core developer since 2005-2006 (for the relativistic physics modules, parallel conversion of MPI-AMRVAC I/O to a large variety of postprocessing formats for later visualization, and for many overall code additions/improvements), and Oliver Porth joining in on the core team since 2010. Other contributors to the project are Allard Jan van Marle (for optically thin radiative loss treatments), Peter Delmont (some of the visualization capabilities), Chun Xia ([an]isotropic thermal conduction) and the growing number of users at CPA and abroad.

MPI-AMRVAC is an MPI-parallelized Adaptive Mesh Refinement code, with some heritage (in the solver part) to the Versatile Advection Code or VAC, initiated by Gábor Tóth at the Astronomical Institute at Utrecht in November 1994, with help from Rony Keppens since 1996. Previous incarnations of the Adaptive Mesh Refinement version of VAC were of restricted use only, and have been used for basic research in AMR strategies, or for well-targeted applications. This MPI version uses a full octree block-based approach, and allows for general orthogonal coordinate systems. Tests have been performed on various supercomputing facilities throughout Europe.

Selected Related MPI-AMRVAC Publications

1. `MPI-AMRVAC for Solar and Astrophysics`, Porth, O., Xia, C., Hendrix, T., Moschou, S. P., Keppens, R., The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, Volume 214, Issue 1, article id. 4, 26 pp. (2014).
2. `Parallel, grid-adaptive approaches for relativistic hydro and magnetohydrodynamics', R. Keppens, Z. Meliani, A.J. van Marle, P. Delmont, A. Vlasis, & B. van der Holst, 2011, JCP. doi:10.1016/j.jcp.2011.01.020. Special topical issue, with R. Keppens as Associate Editor.
3. `A multidimensional grid-adaptive relativistic magnetofluid code', B. van der Holst, R. Keppens & Z. Meliani, 2008, Comp. Phys. Commun. 179, 617-627
4. `Hybrid block-AMR in cartesian and curvilinear coordinates: MHD applications', B. van der Holst & R. Keppens, 2007, JCP 226, 925-946
5. `AMRVAC and relativistic hydrodynamic simulations for GRB afterglow phases', Z. Meliani, R. Keppens, F. Casse, & D. Giannios, 2007, MNRAS 376, 1189-1200
6. `Adaptive Mesh Refinement for conservative systems: multi-dimensional efficiency evaluation', R. Keppens, M. Nool, G. Toth, J.P. Goedbloed, 2003, Comp. Phys. Comm. 153 (No. 3, 1 july issue), 317-339.