EarthquakesSupercomputers allow for more realistic earthquake simulations
A team of researchers has developed a highly scalable computer code that promises dramatically to cut both research times and energy costs in simulating seismic hazards throughout California and elsewhere. The team performed GPU-based benchmark simulations of the 5.4 magnitude earthquake that occurred in July 2008 below Chino Hills, near Los Angeles.
A team of researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, has developed a highly scalable computer code that promises dramatically to cut both research times and energy costs in simulating seismic hazards throughout California and elsewhere.
A University of California, San Diego release reports that the team, led by Yifeng Cui, a computational scientist at SDSC, developed the scalable GPU (graphical processing units) accelerated code for use in earthquake engineering and disaster management through regional earthquake simulations at the petascale level as part of a larger computational effort coordinated by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC). San Diego State University (SDSU) is also part of this collaborative effort in pushing the envelope toward extreme-scale earthquake computing.
“The increased capability of GPUs, combined with the high-level GPU programming language CUDA, has provided tremendous horsepower required for acceleration of numerically intensive 3D simulation of earthquake ground motions,” said Cui, who recently presented the team’s new development at the NVIDIA 2013 GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California.
A technical paper based on this work will be presented 5-7 June at the 2013 International Conference on Computational Science Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
The accelerated code, which was done using GPUs as opposed to CPUs, or central processing units, is based on a widely-used wave propagation code called AWP-ODC, which stands for Anelastic Wave Propagation by Olsen, Day, and Cui. It was named after Kim Olsen and Steven Day, geological science professors at San Diego State University (SDSU), and SDSC’s Cui. The research team restructured the code to exploit high performance and throughput, memory locality, and overlapping of computation and communication, which made it possible to scale the code linearly to more than 8,000 NVIDIA Kepler GPU accelerators.
The team performed GPU-based benchmark simulations of the 5.4 magnitude earthquake that occurred in July 2008 below Chino Hills, near Los Angeles. Compute systems included Keeneland, managed by Georgia Tech, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), and also part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), and Blue Waters, based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Also used was the Titan supercomputer, based at ORNL and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Titan is equipped with Cray XK7 systems and
