A parallelized particle tracing code for massive 3D mantle flow simulations
Abstract
The problem of convective flows in a highly viscous fluid represents a common research direction in Earth Sciences. For tracing the convective motion of the fluid material, a source passive particles (or tracers) that flow at a local convection velocity and do not affect the pattern of flow it is commonly used. Here we present a parallelized tracer code that uses passive and weightless particles with their position computed from their displacement during a small time interval at the velocity of flow previously calculated for a given point in space and time. The tracer code is integrated in the open source package CitcomS, which is widely used in the solid earth community (www.geodynamics.org). We benchmarked the tracer code on the state-of-the-art CyberDyn parallel machine, a High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster with 1344 computing cores available at the Institute of Geodynamics of the Romanian Academy. The benchmark tests are performed using a series of 3D geodynamic settings where we introduced various clusters of tracers at different places in the models. Using several millions of particles, the benchmark results show that the parallelized tracer code performs well with an optimum number of computing cores between 32 and 64. Because of the large amount of communications among the computing cores, high-resolution CFD simulations for geodynamic predictions that require tens of millions, or even billions of tracers to accurately track mantle flow, will greatly benefit from HPC systems based on low-latency high-speed interconnects. In this paper we will present several study cases regarding the 3D mantle flow as revealed by tracers in active subduction zones, as the subduction of Rivera and Cocos plates beneath North America plate as well as the subduction of Nazca plate beneath the South America plate.
- Publication:
-
AGU Spring Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- May 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUSMIN23A..06M
- Keywords:
-
- 1908 INFORMATICS / Cyberinfrastructure;
- 1932 INFORMATICS / High-performance computing