Scalable Earthquake Simulation on Petascale Supercomputers

Yifeng Cui, Kim B. Olsen, Thomas H. Jordan, Kwangyoon Lee, Jun Zhou, Patrick Small, Geoffrey P. Ely, Daniel Roten, Dhabaleswar K. Panda, Amit Chourasia, John Levesque, Steven M. Day, & Philip J. Maechling

Published 2011, SCEC Contribution #1507

Petascale simulations are needed to understand the rupture and wave dynamics of the largest earthquakes at shaking frequencies required to engineer safe structures (> 1 Hz). Toward this goal, we have developed a highly scalable, parallel application (AWP-ODC) that has achieved “M8”: a full dynamical simulation of a magnitude-8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas fault up to 2 Hz. M8 was calculated using a uniform mesh of 435 billion 40-m3 cubes to represent the three-dimensional crustal structure of Southern California, in a 800 km by 400 km area comprising over 20 million people. This production run producing 360 sec of wave propagation sustained 220 Tflop/s for 24 hours on NCCS Jaguar using 223,074 cores. As the largest-ever earthquake simulation, M8 opens new territory for earthquake science and engineering—the physics-based modeling of the largest seismic hazards with the goal of reducing their potential for loss of life and property.

Citation
Cui, Y., Olsen, K. B., Jordan, T. H., Lee, K., Zhou, J., Small, P., Ely, G. P., Roten, D., Panda, D. K., Chourasia, A., Levesque, J., Day, S. M., & Maechling, P. J. (2011). Scalable Earthquake Simulation on Petascale Supercomputers. Oral Presentation at 2010 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. doi: 10.1109/SC.2010.45.