Towards modeling high mass ratio binary black hole inspirals and mergers

Einstein's general theory of relativity has made various accurate predictions in the relatively weak gravitational fields of our solar system. Gravitational wave astronomy has provided scientists with the opportunity to test general relativity in the strong gravitational fields of binary black hole mergers. Massively parallel numerical relativity codes have modeled black hole inspirals and mergers and obtained the resulting gravitational waveforms. As the mass ratio of the two black holes is increased, the computational time required to model the system rises as well. We present a new code, Dendro-GR, which when fully functional will be able to model binary black hole inspirals and mergers with mass ratios of up to 100:1. This represents a significant improvement over the current highest mass ratio modeled of 15:1. Dendro-GR has demonstrated excellent weak scalability up to 131K cores, and has a variety of techniques included to numerically solve partial differential equations. We also present a Dendro-GR sub-module which solves the Maxwell Equations and compare our results to other results presented in the literature, suggesting that the full Dendro-GR code is nearly ready to generate previously unknown gravitational waveforms.