Communications of the ACM
c San Diego Team Achieves Petaflop-Level Earthquake Simulations on Gpu-Powered Supercomputers
The image shows a snapshot of ground motion of the 2008 magnitude-5.4 Chino Hills earthquake in an east-to-west direction; the red-yellow and green-blue colors depict the amplitude of shaking. The simulation indicates that small-scale heterogeneities (cau
Credit: Efecan Poyraz
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) researchers say they have developed highly scalable software that can dramatically cut both research times and energy costs in simulating seismic hazards.
The researchers developed the scalable graphical-processing unit (GPU) accelerated code for use in earthquake engineering and disaster management through regional earthquake simulations at the petascale level.
"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," says UCSD's Yifeng Cui.
The accelerated code is based on a widely used wave propagation code, but it has been restructured to exploit high performance and throughput, memory locality, and overlapping of computation and communication. Researchers can use the software to provide more accurate earthquake predictions with increased physical reality and resolution.
In the future, the researchers hope to use this code to calculate an improved probabilistic seismic hazard forecast for the California region. "Our ultimate goal is to support development of a CyberShake model that can assimilate information during earthquake cascades so we can improve our operational forecasting and early warning systems," Cui says.
From UCSD News (CA)
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