Toward Exascale Earthquake Ground Motion Simulations for Near-Fault Engineering Analysis

Journal Article · Fri Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 2017 · Computing in Science and Engineering

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2017.3421558· OSTI ID:1399737

Johansen, Hans ^[1]; Rodgers, Arthur ^[2]; Petersson, N. Anders ^[2]; McCallen, David ^[1]; Sjogreen, Bjorn ^[2]; Miah, Mamun ^[1]

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1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
2. Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

Modernizing SW4 for massively parallel time-domain simulations of earthquake ground motions in 3D earth models increases resolution and provides ground motion estimates for critical infrastructure risk evaluations. Simulations of ground motions from large (M ≥ 7.0) earthquakes require domains on the order of 100 to500 km and spatial granularity on the order of 1 to5 m resulting in hundreds of billions of grid points. Surface-focused structured mesh refinement (SMR) allows for more constant grid point per wavelength scaling in typical Earth models, where wavespeeds increase with depth. In fact, MR allows for simulations to double the frequency content relative to a fixed grid calculation on a given resource. The authors report improvements to the SW4 algorithm developed while porting the code to the Cori Phase 2 (Intel Xeon Phi) systems at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As a result, investigations of the performance of the innermost loop of the calculations found that reorganizing the order of operations can improve performance for massive problems.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231; AC52-07NA27344
• OSTI ID: 1399737
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1474992
• Report Number(s): LLNL-JRNL--731165
• Journal Information: Computing in Science and Engineering, Journal Name: Computing in Science and Engineering Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 19; ISSN 1521-9615
• Publisher: IEEE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

58 GEOSCIENCES
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
computational seismology
earthquake simulations
exascale computing
scientific computing
structural mechanics