GeoFEM: High performance parallel FEM for solid earth

Abstract

The science and technology agency has begun an "Earth Simulator" project from the fiscal year of 1997, which enables the forecast of various earth phenomena through the simulation of virtual earth placed in a supercomputer. The “GeoFEM” is a parallel finite element software to be run on the "Earth Simulator" to solve problems involving the solid earth and is being developed at RIST. This project is expected to be a breakthrough in bridging the geoscience and information science fields. In this paper, we briefly describe the “GeoFEM” project, then capability for large-scale analysis is discussed and simple example analyses are shown. At this stage, the largest linear elastic problem solved by “GeoFEM” is more than 100M (100,000,000) degree of freedoms on 1,000 PEs Hitachi SR2201 at University of Tokyo.