Scientific Computing Group Seminars - Detail View

Speaker: L. Wilcox

Affiliation: UT Austin

Talk Title: Towards Adaptive Petascale Simulations of Geophysical Phenomena

Invited by: Jan S Hesthaven

Time: May 02 2008 11 a.m.

Location: 182 George Street, Room 110

Abstract:

I will discuss a general approach to simulate geophysical phenomena such as mantle convection, global seismic wave propagation or ice sheet melting. Models for these types of simulations contain many uncertain parameters which can only be measured indirectly implying the need for the solution of inverse problems and uncertainty quantification. The resolution required for the forward modules used in the inverse problem themselves is just now becoming tractable with advanced numerical methods and the advent of petascale machines. As a first step to our goal we have developed a parallel dynamic h-adaptive finite element code which has been scaled up to 32,000 cores on Ranger, the new 500 Teraflops system at TACC. I will discuss the design and implementation of this finite element framework to support this large level of parallelism. Finally I will present some initial results of modeling convection.