Forward and adjoint simulations of seismic wave propagation on emerging large-scale GPU architectures

Max Rietmann, Peter Messmer, Tarje Nissen-Meyer, Daniel Peter, Piero Basini, Dimitri Komatitsch, Olaf Schenk, Jeroen Tromp, Lapo Boschi, Domenico Giardini

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

53 Scopus citations

Abstract

Computational seismology is an area of wide sociological and economic impact, ranging from earthquake risk assessment to subsurface imaging and oil and gas exploration. At the core of these simulations is the modeling of wave propagation in a complex medium. Here we report on the extension of the high-order finite-element seismic wave simulation package SPECFEM3D to support the largest scale hybrid and homogeneous supercomputers. Starting from an existing highly tuned MPI code, we migrated to a CUDA version. In order to be of immediate impact to the science mission of computational seismologists, we had to port the entire production package, rather than just individual kernels. One of the challenges in parallelizing finite element codes is the potential for race conditions during the assembly phase. We therefore investigated different methods such as mesh coloring or atomic updates on the GPU. In order to achieve strong scaling, we needed to ensure good overlap of data motion at all levels, including internode and host-accelerator transfers. Finally we carefully tuned the GPU implementation. The new MPI/CUDA solver exhibits excellent scalability and achieves speedup on a node-to-node basis over the carefully tuned equivalent multi-core MPI solver. To demonstrate the performance of both the forward and adjoint functionality, we present two case studies run on the Cray XE6 CPU and Cray XK6 GPU architectures up to 896 nodes: (1) focusing on most commonly used forward simulations, we simulate seismic wave propagation generated by earthquakes in Turkey, and (2) testing the most complex seismic inversion type of the package, we use ambient seismic noise to image 3-D crust and mantle structure beneath western Europe.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2012 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC 2012
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event2012 24th International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC 2012 - Salt Lake City, UT, United States
Duration: Nov 10 2012Nov 16 2012

Publication series

NameInternational Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC
ISSN (Print)2167-4329
ISSN (Electronic)2167-4337

Other

Other2012 24th International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySalt Lake City, UT
Period11/10/1211/16/12

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software

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