© ZAG Publisher Exploiting HPC Methods in Analysis of Multifield Problems in Applied Geoscience

Abstract. This paper presents development and use of High Performance Computing (HPC) methods in order to solve problems in applied geoscience. These applications are mostly not academic problems but have arisen from field work at several ’real ’ investigation sites. ’Real world problems ’ are still very difficult to simulate, because available computing power is still too low for detailed structure models for geosystems. Especially the problems that we are dealing with in this paper are influenced by a lot of different aspects like thermal (T), hydraulic (H), and mechanical (M) problems. For the computing part we develop the scientific software platform GeoSys/RockFlow (GS/RF) using on domain schemes (finite elements and finite volume). GS/RF, which is based on object-oriented methods, is designed to solve coupled multi-field problems in porous media applications. Numerical results are given which provide the complete thermal, two-phase-flow, inelastic deformation court. Three applications from different disciplines in geoscience are presented. The analysis of the geotechnical FEBEX experiment, which requires fully coupled T H 2 M simulations. Further applications presented in this paper are models for water resources management purposes in the Jordan Valley area and geothermal reservoir analysis of the Bad Urach hot-dryrock site in South Germany. These numerical models are very demanding in terms of computation time and memory requirements which exceeds the capabilities of single processor architecture. The introduction of HPC methods in geoscience is very important for more realistic models capturing the complex structure of geosystems as well as all related processes.