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DESCRIPTION
PyLith is a finite-element code with a primary focus on modeling interseismic and coseismic deformation of Earth’s
crust and upper mantle. PyLith supports 2D and 3D static, quasistatic (neglecting inertia), and dynamic (including
inertia) formulations of the governing equations, which can be elasticity, incompressble elasticity, or poroelasticity. A
variety of elastic and viscoelastic bulk rheologies are supported. Boundary conditions include Dirichlet, Neumann,
and absorbing boundaries. Faults are treated as interior interfaces. Currently, only the slip must be prescribed (kine-
matic rupture). We plan to reimplement spontaneous rupture (fault friction) in an upcoming release; see ref{sec-
development-plan} for more information.
The code is written in C++ and Python and uses MPI for parallel processing. We use the Pyre Python framework
to setup the simulation. We leverage PETSc for finite-element data structures and operations as well as linear and
nonlinear solvers.
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