An Implementation of the Adaptive Ray Tracing Method in the Athena Code

The incorporation of radiation from massive stars is essential for modeling the dynamics and chemistry of star-forming clouds, yet it is a computationally demanding task for three-dimensional problems. We describe the implementation and tests of radiative transfer module due to point sources on a three-dimensional Cartesian grid in the Eulerian MHD code Athena. To solve the integral form of the radiation transfer equation, we adopt a widely-used long characteristics method with spatially adaptive ray tracing in which rays are split when sampling of cells becomes coarse. We use a completely asynchronous communication pattern between processors to accelerate transport of rays through a computational domain, a major source of performance bottleneck. The results of strong and weak scaling tests show that our code performs well with a large number of processors. We apply our radiation hydrodynamics code to some test problems involving dynamical expansion of HII regions.