Underworld Geodynamics

Underworld 

is a mathematically self-describing, parallel finite-element code for geodynamics. You write the physics as symbolic mathematics in Python; Underworld turns it into compiled C and solves it on anything from a laptop to a supercomputer, without you rewriting it in between.

Optimal Transport Meshing Strategies for Unstructured, Hierarchical Grids

It is a particle-in-cell code: a mesh carries the finite-element solution while a swarm of Lagrangian particles carries history — stress, composition, damage — through the large deformations that geological materials undergo. The mesh does not have to follow the material, which is what makes long-timescale problems tractable.

The Underworld geodynamics group works on scientific problems, computational algorithms, and software for Earth and planetary dynamics. Everything we produce is released under open source licences, so that anyone can reproduce our results and build on them.

Our particular interest is the long-term evolution of the Earth, and helping other people run time-evolving models of plate- and lithosphere-scale problems.

The group is based in Australia — at the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, Curtin University and Monash University — with collaborators across the (under)world.

Documentation

If you want to learn more about the project and what we do, www.underworldcode.org has technical notes, news, and background information. The documentation pages are the source of all truth about using the code, and it is generated from the repository, so it is current by construction: underworld3.readthedocs.io — installation, tutorials, worked examples and the full API reference.

• Source code: github.com/underworldcode/underworld3 (LGPL-3; notebooks and documentation CC-BY-4.0)
• Questions and bugs: open an issue
• Try it now, nothing to install: run it in the cloud
• How to cite it: see the citation page

About us

Underworld is community research infrastructure, funded by AuScope as part of the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

Development is led from the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University and overseen by a steering committee drawn from the supporting organisations and from the user community. Day-to-day decisions — what gets built, what gets fixed, what gets released — happen in the open, on the issue tracker and in pull requests, and that record is the authoritative one.

Additional support has come from the Australian Research Council, the NeCTAR eResearch Tools programme, and the National Computational Infrastructure. Underworld was originally conceived as a joint project with the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing.