oa Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (VGL) version 1.1: Recent developments to incorporate 3D geological maps and thermal modelling using the Underworld software

The Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (VGL) is an environment that was developed as a data discovery and delivery facility, incorporating software and computing facilities. This design enables geoscientists to store, discover, retrieve and process datasets. Recent developments are expanding the VGL to incorporate the functionality of the Underworld software. Underworld is open source, parallelised software capable of calculating the 3D temperature distribution in the crust.

Numerical modelling of temperature is a tool that can be used to predict the temperature distribution at depth between and beneath measurement points based on a 3D geological map. Due to their size, temperature simulations performed on some of these 3D maps can have large memory requirements. To address these requirements and reduce computation time, cluster computing facilities (which have multiple individual processors) can be utilised. In order to analyse uncertainty quantitatively, hundreds to thousands of individual runs are often needed and therefore cluster computing facilities are necessary to complete the runs in a reasonable timeframe.

The new developments to VGL will facilitate the discovery and access to 3D geological maps. They will also provide easier access to the Underworld software, and will provide the high performance computing facilities (hosted at the National Computational Infrastructure and elsewhere) required to run large models. The metadata associated with each run performed using VGL is automatically stored, and therefore runs completed on VGL will be repeatable and testable.