Case Study: Seismic Tomography and Convection Modelling Of the Earth’s Mantle by the Terra Group

• Simulations run on 512 processors of the Cray T3E for up to 12 hours.

• Mantle currents effect continental drift as well as volcanic and seismic activity.

• Seismograms from over 10,000 earthquakes at 3000 observation stations have been collected.

• Travel times of seismic observations are inverted by lateral tomography.

• Lateral tomography results are compared to lateral variation in seismic velocity produced with lateral temperature perturbations of the mantle model for validation.

Previous slide

Next slide

Back to first slide

View graphic version

The essential idea behind parallel computing is to get the results quicker so let us start by quantifying that.