LaMEM Userguide

LaMEM (Lithosphere and Mantle Evolution Model) is a software package to simulate 2D/3D geological and geomechanical processes, which runs on anything from your laptop to a massively parallel machine. It takes (poro)-visco-elasto-plastic rheologies into account, and can be used to simulate anything from the collision of tectonic plates to the flow of fluids through porous rocks.

The purpose of this wiki is to get you started with installing and running LaMEM and give a few worked-out examples that explain how to run LaMEM on your local machine or cluster.

Contents

• 1. Installation
• 2. Getting Started
• 3. Initial Model Setup
• 4. Examples
• 5. Features
• 6. LaMEM Development
• 7. LaMEM Debugging

Features

LaMEM contains a number of features, specifically tailored to simulate geological processes and complex geometries:

• 2D/3D parallel thermomechanical code for cartesian geometries

• Build from the onset to run on MPI-parallel machines; the largest we tested had 458'752 processors

• Support for both direct solvers and multigrid solvers

• Marker and cell approach to simulate complex geometries and large strains

• Newton solvers for nonlinear iterations

• Multiple ways to create model geometries: (1) Build-in geometrical objects, (2) MATLAB/Octave input files, (3) GeomIO support to create 2D/3D input geometries from vector graphics, (4) Voxel-based input (to compute effective permeabilities of porous rocks).

• Mechanical solver for visco-elasto-plastic solvers, for both (thermo)-elastic bulk compressible and incompressible cases

• Nonlinear combined rock creep laws and (regularized) non-associated plasticity

• Internal free surface and sticky air approach

• Energy solver with shear heating

• Fluid pressure and Darcy solver for groundwater flow

• Phase transitions, by taking (multiple) precomputed phase diagrams into account

• Partial melting

• Simplified erosion/sedimentation algorithms

• Breakpointing/restarting options

• Adjoint formulations to perform inversions and derive scaling laws

Getting started

We recommend that your start with reading the installation instructions.

Extending this userguide

This wiki uses the Markdown syntax.

The wiki itself is actually a git repository, which means you can clone it, edit it locally/offline, add images or any other file type, and push it back to us. It will be live immediately.

Go ahead and try:

$ git clone https://bkaus@bitbucket.org/bkaus/lamem.git/wiki

Wiki pages are normal files, with the .md extension. You can edit them locally, as well as creating new ones.