Three-dimensional Spherical Simulations of Convection in Earth’s Mantle and Core Using Massively-parallel Computers

Convection of the 3000 km thick rocky mantle and the liquid iron core below it are the two most important large-scale dynamical processes in Earth’s interior. Two computer codes using different numerical techniques (spectral and multigrid) have been developed for modeling convection in these two quite different environments, in three-dimensional spherical geometry. Under the NASA HPCC program these codes have been substantially improved into fast, efficient, research tools capable of exceeding 100 Gflops performance on Cray T3E massively-parallel supercomputers. The unprecedented capabilities offered by these codes has enabled several scientific breakthroughs. These results demonstrate that real, scientifically-meaningful models containing complicated physics on grids with tens to hundreds of millions of degrees of freedom are practical on the current generation of parallel machines.