ITR/AP: Simulation of Multi-Scale Deformation in Solid Earth Geophysics

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

0205653 Gurnis This is a project to develop a suite of tools to model multi-scale deformation for Earth Science problems. This effort is motivated by the need to understand interctions between the long-term evolution of plate tectonics and shorter term processes such as the evolution of faults during and between earthquakes. Several major data acquisition efforts within the Earth Sciences community are underway or at an advanced planning stage (EarthScope including PBO - Plate Boundary Observatory, InSAR - Satellite based Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, USArray - a 400 element moveable seismic array, GPS - continuous Global Positioning System measurements). These observational programs will rapidly produce vast, high-quality data sets which record deformation of the Earth's surface on multiple time scales, from co-seismic and post-seismic to long term tectonic time scales, and on multiple spatial scales, from centimeters to thousands of kilometers. The Principal Investigators will produce a modeling package, usable by the entire Earth sciences community, that addresses the limitations of what is currently feasible and that is engineered with software evolution and growth as design requirements. Their efforts will extend the capabilities of the PYRE framework, an object-oriented environment capable of specifying and launching numerical simulations on multiple platforms, including Beowulf class parallel computers, that can function with grid-computing systems. Specifically, the community needs fexible modeling tools that incorporate complex rheologies, e.g., temperature-dependent, non-Newtonian, visco-elasto-plasticity with discrete failure planes and dynamic re-gridding to resolve evolving regions of high strain. From a computational perspective, this is an excellent time to pursue these objectives. Major advances in the PC industry enable scientists to build massively parallel PC cluster computers that facilitate realistic 3-D simulations at reasonable computational and monetary costs. Complimenting these hardware advances are major architectural solutions allowing more traditional codes to be bound together to solve complex, multi-scale, multi-physics problems. This will be a collaborative project between two Caltech units; The Center for Advanced Computer Research (CACR) and the Seismological Laboratory. After about eighteen months into the project, beta versions of the software will be made available to the community and final versions will be available without restrictions, installed on NSF PACI computing facilities, for example. The new geodynamics modeling framework will easily allow one to launch 2-D AND 3-D simulations on platforms ranging in scale from uniprocessors to the TerraGrid, making the code useful to a wide range of users from individual scientists and educators to inter disciplinary teams working on state of the art calculations posed within EarthScope. ***