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KAUST-IAMCS Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Wave Propagation and Applications

Christian Pelties, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany)
The Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Realistic Earthquake Modeling on HPC Infrastructure

Abstract

We will present the arbitrary high-order derivative discontinuous Galerkin (ADER-DG) method on three-dimensional unstructured tetrahedral meshes for realistic earthquake modeling. The support of unstructured tetrahedral meshes highly expedites the model building process and allows for complex topography and complicated geological subsurface structures. Typical problem sizes require a good performance on parallel machines in order to simulate desired high frequencies that is given for ADER-DG. A special focus will lie on the implementation on dynamic rupture sources where the fault slip is a spontaneous consequence of the state of the fault. The code has been benchmarked by comparing results of the SCEC test case with other established numerical methods such as Finite Difference and Spectral Boundary Integral. An important result is that the ADER-DG method avoids spurious high-frequency contributions in the slip rate spectra, usually present in other dynamic rupture solvers, and therefore does not require artificial Kelvin-Voigt damping. To demonstrate the capabilities of the high-order accurate ADER-DG scheme we use the 1992 Landers earthquake as an example. It represents a complex fault system including branching and six curved fault segments. Furthermore, topography is respected in the discretized model to capture the surface waves correctly. Strong mesh coarsening or refinement at areas of interest is applied to keep the computational costs feasible. Finally current problems and further developments will be discussed.