Tuning symplectic integrators is easy and worthwhile

TL;DR

This paper highlights that tuning symplectic integrators is straightforward and can significantly enhance performance with minimal programming effort, benefiting computational physics applications.

Contribution

It demonstrates that optimizing the ordering of terms in symplectic integrators is simple and yields substantial performance gains.

Findings

Optimized term ordering improves integrator efficiency

Minimal programming overhead for tuning

Performance gains are significant in computational physics

Abstract

Many applications in computational physics that use numerical integrators based on splitting and composition can benefit from the development of optimized algorithms and from choosing the best ordering of terms. The cost in programming and execution time is minimal, while the performance improvements can be large.