On long enough time scales, the Earth mantle (the region between the rigid
plates at the surface and the liquid metal outer core at depth) behaves
like a non-Newtonian fluid with a strongly temperature dependent viscosity.
While it moves only a few centimeters per year, the large length scales
nevertheless lead to very large Rayleigh numbers and, consequently, very
complex and expensive numerical simulations. At the same time, given the
inaccessibility of the Earth mantle to direct experimental observation
implies that numerical simulation is one of the few available tools to
elucidate what exactly is going on the mantle, how it affects the long-term
evolution of Earth's thermal and chemical structure, as well as what drives
and sustains plate motion.
I will here review the approach we have taken in building the
state-of-the-art open source solver ASPECT
(see http://aspect.dealii.org) to
simulate realistic conditions in the Earth and other celestial bodies.
ASPECT is built using some of the most widely used and best software
libraries for common tasks, such as deal.II for mesh handling and
discretization, p4est for parallel partitioning and rebalancing, and
Trilinos for linear algebra. In this talk, I will focus on the choices we
have made regarding the numerical methods used in ASPECT, and in particular
on the interplay between higher order discretizations on adaptive meshes,
linear and nonlinear solvers, optimal preconditioners, and approaches to
scale to thousands of processor cores. All of these are necessary for
simulations that can answer geosphysical questions.
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