Abelian-Higgs Cosmic String Evolution with CUDA
  Topological defects form at cosmological phase transitions by the Kibble
mechanism, with cosmic strings and superstrings having the most interesting
phenomenology. A rigorous analysis of their astrophysical consequences is
limited by the availability of accurate numerical simulations, and therefore by
hardware resources and computation time. Improving the speed and efficiency of
existing codes is therefore essential. All current cosmic string simulations
were performed on Central Processing Units. In previous work we presented a
General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit implementation of the evolution of
cosmological domain wall networks. Here we continue this paradigm shift and
discuss an analogous implementation for local Abelian-Higgs strings networks.
We discuss the implementation algorithm (including the discretization used and
how to calculate network averaged quantities) and then showcase its performance
and current bottlenecks. We validate the code by directly comparing our results
for the canonical scaling properties of the networks in the radiation and
matter eras with those in the literature, finding very good agreement. We
finally highlight possible directions for improving the scalability of the
code.
