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CSM Affiliates Modeling & Control Reports FacilitiesOmar Ghattas | View profile
Carsten Burstedde | View profile
Georg Stadler | View profile
Lucas Wilcox | View profile
Mantle convection is the principal control on the thermal and geological evolution of the Earth. Mantle convection modeling involves solution of the mass, momentum, and energy equations for a viscous, creeping, incompressible non-Newtonian fluid at high Rayleigh and Peclet numbers. Our goal is to conduct global mantle convection simulations that can resolve faulted plate boundaries, down to 1 km scales. Uniform resolution leads to trillion element meshes, which are intractable even on petascale supercomputers. Thus parallel mesh adaptivity is essential.
In this project we develop Rhea, a new generation mantle convection code designed to scale to hundreds of thousands of cores. Rhea is built on ALPS, our parallel octree-based adaptive finite element library that supports new distributed data structures and parallel algorithms for dynamic coarsening, refinement, rebalancing, and repartitioning of the mesh.
Thermal isosurfaces and adaptively refined mesh in mantle convection simulation.