MALBEC: a new CUDA-C ray-tracer in General Relativity

TL;DR

MALBEC is a CUDA-C based ray-tracer for simulating orbits around black holes, offering faster and efficient numerical analysis of test particles in Schwarzschild and Kerr metrics, with new equations for circular orbits.

Contribution

Introduction of MALBEC, a GPU-accelerated ray-tracer for black hole orbits, including new equations for circular orbits and validation against analytical results.

Findings

MALBEC efficiently reproduces known orbital behaviors.

The code outperforms CPU implementations in speed.

New equations accurately describe circular orbits in black hole metrics.

Abstract

A new CUDA-C code for tracing orbits around non-charged black holes is presented. This code, named MALBEC, take advantage of the graphic processing units and the CUDA platform for tracking null and timelike test particles in Schwarzschild and Kerr. Also, a new general set of equations that describe the closed circular orbits of any timelike test particle in the equatorial plane is derived. These equations are extremely important in order to compare the analytical behavior of the orbits with the numerical results and verify the correct implementation of the Runge-Kutta algorithm in MALBEC. Finally, other numerical tests are performed, demonstrating that MALBEC is able to reproduce some well-known results in these metrics in a faster and more efficient way than a conventional CPU implementation.