ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY

In the framework of the ASCETE (Advanced Simulation of Coupled Earthquake and Tsunami Events) project, the computational seismology group of LMU Munich and the high performance computing group of TUM jointly used the SuperMUC HPC infrastructures for running large-scale modeling of earthquake rupture dynamics and tsunami propagation and inundation, to gain insight into earthquake physics and to better understand the fundamental conditions of tsunami generation. The project merges a variety of methods and topics, of which we highlight selected results and impacts in the following sections.

The ExaHyPE SuperMUC-NG project accompanied the corresponding Horizon 2020 project to develop the ExaHyPE engine, a software package to solve hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations (PDEs) using high-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretisation on tree-structured adaptive Cartesian meshes. Hyperbolic conservation laws model a wide range of phenomena and processes in science and engineering – together with a suite of example models, an international multi-institutional research team developed two large demonstrator applications that tackle grand challenge scenarios from earthquake simulation and from relativistic astrophysics.

Hydrometeorological extremes, such as droughts and floods are one of the grand challenges of our future and pose great interest and concern for water management and public safety. Hence, the ClimEx project disaggregates the response of the climate system into changing anthropogenic forcing and natural variability by analyzing a novel large-ensemble of climate simulations, operated using High-Performance Computing. The comprehensive new dataset (CRCM5-LE) generated 50 transient independent and evenly likely realizations of the past and the future climate (1950-2099) over two large domains (Europe, Eastern North America) in high spatial (12km) and temporal (1h-1d) resolution. The resulting 7500 model years allow for a thorough analysis of…

Without its magnetic field, life on Earth’s surface is impossible, since the magnetic field screens us from deadly solar radiation. In order to gain a better understanding of the generation of Earth’s magnetic field and heat flow in the Earth--which is crucial for understanding Earth's history--scientists have performed large scale simulations of crystalline and liquid iron alloys at conditions of Earth’s core, up to 6000K and over 300 million atmospheres of pressure, and have computed the electrical and thermal conductivity. The computationally very intensive first-principles molecular dynamics simulations for fluids required more than 60 million core hours of computing time on SuperMUC.

Much of what one refers to as geological activity of the Earth arises from convective processes within the Earth’s mantle that transport heat from the deep interior of our planet to the surface. One of the major challenges in the geosciences is to constrain the distribution and magnitude of the resulting vast forces that drive plate tectonics. Mantle flow also provides boundary conditions - thermal and mechanical - to other key elements of the Earth system (e.g., geodesy, geodynamo/geomagnetism). This makes fluid dynamic studies of the mantle essential to our understanding of how the entire planet works. In a long-term effort, scientists at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München strive for improved computational models of the Earth's…

Understanding the physics of earthquake rupture occurring on multiple scales and at depths that cannot be probed directly is a ‘Grand Challenge’ of Earth sciences. Geophysicists at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität use the in-house-developed SeisSol earthquake simulation software to improve fundamental comprehension of earthquake dynamics by numerical simulation of complicated wave and rupture phenomena.

Predicting weather and climate and its impacts on the environment, including hazards such as floods, droughts and landslides, continues to be one of the main challenges of the 21st century – in particular for the European region as it is exposed to intense Atlantic synoptic perturbations. Scientists performed for the first time long climate simulations over the European domain at a very fine cloud-permitting resolution of about 4 km with explicitly resolved convection and a sharp representation of orography, thanks to the possibility of running very computationally and data storage demanding simulations on SuperMUC.

Supported by the experts of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), computer scientists, mathematicians, and geophysicists of the Technische Universität München (TUM) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) collectively optimised and completely parallelised the 70,000 lines of code of SeisSol, a software to simulate earth quakes, to optimally leverage the parallel architecture of SuperMUC.