GeoFEST(P) is a computer program written for use in the QuakeSim project, which is devoted to development and improvement of means of computational simulation of earthquakes. GeoFEST(P) models interacting earthquake fault systems from the fault-nucleation to the tectonic scale. The development of GeoFEST(P) has involved coupling of two programs: GeoFEST and the Pyramid Adaptive Mesh Refinement Library. GeoFEST is a message-passinginterface- parallel code that utilizes a finite-element technique to simulate evolution of stress, fault slip, and plastic/ elastic deformation in realistic materials like those of faulted regions of the crust of the Earth. The products of such simulations are synthetic observable time-dependent surface deformations on time scales from days to decades. Pyramid Adaptive Mesh Refinement Library is a software library that facilitates the generation of computational meshes for solving physical problems. In an application of GeoFEST(P), a computational grid can be dynamically adapted as stress grows on a fault. Simulations on workstations using a few tens of thousands of stress and displacement finite elements can now be expanded to multiple millions of elements with greater than 98-percent scaled efficiency on over many hundreds of parallel processors (see figure).

Models of Landers, CA, Earthquake Deformation are shown at two resolutions. These images show the accuracy improvement going from 82,000 finiteelements on four processors (left) to 1.4 million finite elements on 64 processors (right).

This work was done by Andrea Donnellan, Jay Parker, Gregory Lyzenga, Michele Judd, P. Peggy Li, Charles Norton, Edwin Tisdale, and Robert Granat of Caltech for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For further information, access the Technical Support Package (TSP) free on-line at www.techbriefs.com/tsp under the Software category.

This software is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Karina Edmonds of the California Institute of Technology at (626) 395-2322. Refer to NPO-41079.



This Brief includes a Technical Support Package (TSP).
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Progress in Computational Simulation of Earthquakes

(reference NPO-41079) is currently available for download from the TSP library.

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