Numerical Simulation of the Thermal Convection in the Earth's Outer Core

Large-scale simulation of the thermal convection in the Earth's outer core is studied. Starting from a legacy parallel code using Aztec and MPI, two optimized codes have been developed based on the PETSc software package. The first version gains several times acceleration with the help of the block-Jacobi preconditioners and the well-optimized libraries provided in PETSc. The second version, aiming at better parallel scalability, is developed based on the ideas of domain decomposition method for multi-physical problems. Test results employing thousands of processor cores on three supercomputers, i.e., an IBM Blue Gene/L, a Dawning 5000A and a Lenovo DeepComp 7000, are provided.