Blog: Solving an Earth-Sized Jigsaw Puzzle

Solving an Earth-Sized Jigsaw Puzzle
University of Texas at Austin (08/31/10) Aaron Dubrow

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin have developed geodynamics software that enables them to accurately simulate tectonic plate motion. The simulations were facilitated by the accessibility of petascale high performance computing systems that form part of the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF's) TeraGrid as well as other government facilities. Three years ago, NSF awarded the researchers a Petascale Applications grant to study the mantle simulation problem, and the effort yielded a suite of algorithms that tackle the challenges of the global mantle dynamics problem and can utilize computing resources at the highest scale. A central element of the software executes adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) that concentrates the simulation on the relevant parts of the model, with higher resolution and computing power channeled to these areas. The researchers say the AMR algorithms could be important tools for a broad spectrum of multiscale challenges, such as the simulation of Antarctic ice sheet dynamics. The AMR library has been embedded in the deal.II open source finite element code, which will allow scientists to employ parallel AMR methods in applications characterized by a wide range of time and length scales, such as problems in materials processing or astrophysics.

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