High accuracy gravitational waveforms in SpEC and the dominant sources of errors

We need more accurate gravitational waveforms for the next generation of gravitational wave detectors. One obvious challenge is the sheer amount of compute required to run these simulations at high resolutions. The community is developing a lot of new codes that deal with this by being more efficient and leveraging modern hardware. The other, less obvious challenge is ensuring that our algorithms and formalisms are good enough to fully utilize this increase in computing power. To deal with this, we need to understand the sources of errors in our simulations and ensure they behave nicely as we increase the resolution. In this presentation, we will discuss various sources of errors in the NR code SpEC and how they affect the accuracy of the waveforms. We will also highlight some recent improvements to SpEC and existing sources of errors requiring more careful handling.