Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-5839
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-5839
26 Oct 2026
 | 26 Oct 2026
Status: this preprint is open for discussion and under review for Geoscientific Model Development (GMD).

TERRA-NG v1.0: Extreme-Scale, GPU-accelerated Mantle Convection

Fabian Böhm, Nils Kohl, Ponsuganth Ilangovan, Gabriel Robl, Fatemeh Rezaei, Marcus Mohr, Bernhard Schuberth, Harald Köstler, Hans-Peter Bunge, and Ulrich Rüde

Abstract. We present TERRA-NG, a portable, GPU-accelerated, matrix-free mantle-convection code. A single Kokkos C++ implementation runs at scale on NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPU supercomputers. TERRA-NG has a deliberately narrow design: built on a radially extruded mesh of spherical wedges, tailored to the spherical shell geometry, which enables domain-specific optimizations like single quadrature-point integral-evaluations, radial coordinate storage compression and radial shared-memory tiling. The corresponding low-order W1-iso-W2/W1 wedge-based Stokes--energy discretisation is verified against the Zhong et al.(2008) spherical-shell convection benchmark suite. We showcase TERRA-NG through strong- and weak-scaling on the JUWELS Booster (NVIDIA A100), MareNostrum 5 (NVIDIA H100), LUMI-G (AMD MI250X), Hunter (AMD MI300A APU), and SuperMUC-NG Phase 2 (Intel PVC) supercomputers. Coupled mantle convection simulations at ∼11 km and ∼5.6 km radial spacing (∼2.8 B and ∼22 B DoFs) can be run routinely on standard node partitions of all considered systems. Global ∼1 km-per-gridpoint mantle convection (∼1.4 T DoFs) is feasible on an extreme-scale allocation, and a sub-km hero-run at ∼0.7 km grid spacing scaling up to ∼11,000 GPUs of LUMI-G (∼11 T DoFs) shows the potential of the code on future, larger machines.

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Fabian Böhm, Nils Kohl, Ponsuganth Ilangovan, Gabriel Robl, Fatemeh Rezaei, Marcus Mohr, Bernhard Schuberth, Harald Köstler, Hans-Peter Bunge, and Ulrich Rüde

Status: open (until 21 Dec 2026)

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Fabian Böhm, Nils Kohl, Ponsuganth Ilangovan, Gabriel Robl, Fatemeh Rezaei, Marcus Mohr, Bernhard Schuberth, Harald Köstler, Hans-Peter Bunge, and Ulrich Rüde
Fabian Böhm, Nils Kohl, Ponsuganth Ilangovan, Gabriel Robl, Fatemeh Rezaei, Marcus Mohr, Bernhard Schuberth, Harald Köstler, Hans-Peter Bunge, and Ulrich Rüde
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Short summary
Earth's mantle flows slowly like hot wax, moving continents and shaping the planet's surface. Computer models of this flow have long been too coarse to capture its fine structures, because representing the 3000-kilometre-thick mantle around the planet is enormously demanding. We built TERRA-NG, a simulation code designed for the graphics processors of today's fastest supercomputers. It resolves the whole mantle to about one kilometre in seconds per step, aiming to make such simulations routine.
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