LaMEM (Lithosphere and Mantle Evolution Model) is a parallel 3D numerical code that can be used to simulate various thermo-mechanical geodynamical processes such as mantle-lithosphere interaction for rocks that have visco-elasto-plastic rheologies. It was developed to better understand geological processes, particularly related to the dynamics of the crust and lithosphere and their interaction with the mantle. It can also be used to solve geomechanical problems, includes (compressible) poroelasticity, has a gravity solver and an (adjoint) inversion framework. The code uses a marker-in-cell approach with a staggered finite difference discretization and is built on top of PETSc such that it can run on anything from a laptop to a massively parallel machine.
A range of (Galerkin) multigrid and iterative solvers are available, for both linear and non-linear rheologies, using Picard and quasi-Newton solvers (provided through the PETSc interface).
LaMEM has been tested on a variety of machines ranging from laptops to a massively parallel cluster with 458'752 cores.
Have a look at the documentation on how to install the code and run it. You can also install and run a parallel version of LaMEM with the julia package LaMEM.jl, or play with some interactive examples in InteractiveGeodynamics.jl.
LaMEM is an open source code that was initially developed at the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz (Germany). Many other colleagues have contributed to its development as well (see the documentation). The key funding for the Mainz team came from:
- The European Research Council through Grants ERC StG 258830 (MODEL), ERC PoC 713397 (SALTED) and ERC CoG 771143 (MAGMA)
- The German ministry of Science and Eduction (BMBF) through projects SECURE, PERMEA, and PERMEA2.
- Priority programs of the German research foundation (DFG), specifically the 4DMB and Habitable Earth projects.