Abstract
The Earth’s tectonic plates are strong, viscoelastic shells which make up the outermost part of a thermally convecting, predominantly viscous layer; at the boundaries between plates the rheology is thought to be dominated by brittle processes. Brittle failure of the lithosphere occurs when stresses are high. In order to build a realistic simulation of the planet’s evolution, the complete viscoelastic / brittle convection system needs to be considered. A Lagrangian Integration point finite element method is discussed which can simulate very large deformation viscoelasticity with a strain-dependent yield stress. We also describe the general, parallel implementation of this method (Snark) and compare the performance to a highly optimized, serial prototype code (Ellipsis). The specialized code shows better scaling for a single processor. The parallel scaling of the general code is very flat for “realistic” problem sizes indicating efficient use of multiple processors.
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Moresi, L., May, D., Freeman, J., Appelbe, B. (2003). Mantle Convection Modeling with Viscoelastic/Brittle Lithosphere: Numerical and Computational Methodology. In: Sloot, P.M.A., Abramson, D., Bogdanov, A.V., Gorbachev, Y.E., Dongarra, J.J., Zomaya, A.Y. (eds) Computational Science — ICCS 2003. ICCS 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2659. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44863-2_76
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44863-2_76
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