State-of-the-Art Computational Methodology for Modelling Processes in the Earth's Mantle

This is a poster describing three algorithms or Scientific Software Elements (SSEs) for computing / modelling processes in the Earth's Mantle. These SSEs have been implemented in the open source code ASPECT, which is a carefully parallelized Finite Element code with Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) for modeling problems in the Earth's mantle. Two of these SSEs have never before been implemented in a code for modeling convection in the Earth's mantle, namely (1) a Volume-of-Fluid interface tracking algorithm and (2) a Bound Preserving Discontinuous Galerkin method. We also describe our implementation of an active tracer particle method in ASPECT and present a method for load balancing the combination of AMR and the work done to use the particles in a computation. We present the results of computations of several standard benchmark problems in computational mantle dynamics with these SSEs.