A Lattice Solid Model to simulate the micro-physics of earthquakes: toward 3D large scale simulations
D. G. Place, Péter Móra · 1999
The particle-based lattice solid model developed to study the physics of rocks and the non-linear dynamics of earthquakes is motivated by the molecular dynamics methods and is comparable to the discrete element method. In order to allow large scale simulations to be performed, a high performance must be obtained when implementing the model. This is achieved by refining the model according to the computer architecture and by developing algorithms that use the full potential of the given parallel super-computer. Particles in the model represents grains of rocks where interactions are computed via a neighbors table updated only when new contacts occur. An adaptative time step increment is implemented to minimize the total compuational time for a simulation. To compute the frictional force between particles, a non-linear system is resolved at each time step using a modified Newton algorithm. Except for the computation of the frictional forces, parallelism is obtained by distributing the wo...