Testing the accuracy limit of binary black hole simulations in SpEC

SpEC is the current generation code based on Spectral methods used for binary black hole simulations by the SXS collaboration. A binary black hole simulation involves a lot of moving parts like the initial data, junk radiation, boundary conditions, control system, horizon finder etc. While spectral methods have spectral convergence, it is not clear that we can simply crank up the resolution and expect all the other things to keep working well. Although SpEC's accuracy is sufficient for current detectors, much higher accuracy will be needed for future detectors such as LISA. Therefore, it is important to know what ultimately limits the accuracy of SpEC, the idea of this project is to investigate and overcome these limits. These improvements can then be ported over to our next-generation code SpECTRE, which is designed to scale to large numbers of cores much better than SpEC.