Collaborative Research: Understanding the dynamics of the Earth: High-Resolution Mantle Convection Simulation on Petascale Computers

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NSF PetaApps 0749334/0748898/0749045: Understanding the Dynamics of the Earth: High-Resolution Mantle Convection Simulation on Petascale Computers George Biros (Penn), Omar Ghattas (UT-Austin), Michael Gurnis (CalTech), Shijie Zhong (CU-Boulder) Mantle convection is the principal control on the thermal and geological evolution of the Earth. It is central to our understanding of the origin and evolution of tectonic deformation, the evolution of the thermal and compositional states of the mantle, and ultimately the evolution of the Earth as a whole. Despite its central importance to our understanding of the dynamics of the solid Earth, simulation of global mantle convection at realistic Rayleigh numbers down to the scale of faulted plate boundaries is currently intractable, due to the wide range of time and length scales involved. This project will capitalize on upcoming petascale computing systems to carry out the first high resolution mantle convection simulations that can resolve thermal boundary layers and faulted plate boundaries, which will enable the first inverse solutions that can incorporate historical plate motions. These simulations will lead to breakthroughs in understanding the dynamics of the solid Earth. However, to make effective use of the upcoming petascale systems, new scalable algorithms and implementations are needed. To enable these simulations, this project will: (1) tune, improve the performance of, and scale up to the petascale the parallel open-source mantle convection code CitcomS; (2) develop, implement, robustify, and incorporate new parallel algorithms for adaptive mesh refinement and inverse solution that can scale to hundreds of thousands of processor cores; and (3) release the resulting mantle convection codes to the geosciences community via the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG), an NSF center that develops and maintains software for several earth science communities.