Modelling the core convection using finite element and finite difference methods

Applications of both parallel finite element and finite difference methods to thermal convection in a rotating spherical shell modelling the fluid dynamics of the Earth’s outer core are presented. The numerical schemes are verified by reproducing the convection benchmark test by Christensen et al. [Christensen, U.R., Aubert, J., Cardin, P., Dormy, E., Gibbons, S., Glatzmaier, G.A., Grote, E., Honkura, Y., Jones, C., Kono, M., Matsushima, M., Sakuraba, A., Takahashi, F., Tilgner, A., Wilcht, J., Zhang, K., 2001. A numerical dynamo benchmark. Phys. Earth Planet. Interiors 128, 25–34.]. Both global average and local characteristics agree satisfactorily with the benchmark solution. With the element-by-element (EBE) parallelization technique, the finite element code demonstrates nearly optimal linear scalability in computational speed. The finite difference code is also efficient and scalable by utilizing a parallel library Aztec [Tuminaro, R.S., Heroux, M., Hutchinson, S.A., Shadid, J.N., 1999. Official AZTEC User’s Guide: Version 2.1.].