GNGTS 2024 - Atti del 42° Convegno Nazionale

Session 3.3 GNGTS 2024 ShellSet – Parallel dynamic neotectonic modelling J. B. May 1 , P. Bird 2,1 , M. M. C. Carafa 1 1 Isttuto Nazionale di Geofsica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Italy 2 Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, UCLA, U.S.A Introducton Recent decades have seen an almost contnuous improvement in computng power and techniques; but the general scientfc community too ofen misses out on these improvements. Research insttutons, both academic and industrial (public and private), typically provide employees with personal machines for their work, with even the least powerful of these capable of simulatons, in serial and parallel, that would have required much more expensive hardware only a decade previously. Unlocking this potental is key to acceleratng scientfc discovery in every feld, partcularly where modelling is concerned. The calculatons involved in forward modelling are ofen tme-consuming, perhaps because of the number of calculatons e.g., 3D models, or because the underlying model is very large, e.g., a global model. Reducing the tme required for these models would improve program usability and lead to faster hypothesis testng. Simply relying on the relentless improvement of computng capabilites to increase program performance is sub-optmal and many existng programs would beneft from relatvely small alteratons to their source code to fully utlize these improvements. Here, we present a hybrid parallel program called ShellSet (May et al. 2023). ShellSet improves upon well-known and robust sofware by simplifying the user interface, removing all prompted user input, and reducing the tme to result by employing an MPI (message passing interface) framework to run multple models in parallel. Sofware ShellSet (frst presented in May et al., 2023) is a combinaton of three programs which are well known within sectons of the geoscientfc community, having been developed over recent decades, all of which are available from htp://peterbird.name. Briefy, OrbData calculates the crust and mantle-lithosphere thicknesses at each node of a given fnite element grid, adding a “lithospheric density anomaly of chemical origin” at each node which is adjusted to achieve isostasy with other nodes. OrbScore calculates the scores for any/all of the six Shells predictons, for relatve realism, against supplied real data. The six testable predictons