Modeling the propagation of elastic waves using spectral elements on a cluster of 192 GPUs

Abstract

We implement a high-order finite-element application, which performs the numerical simulation of seismic wave propagation resulting for instance from earthquakes at the scale of a continent or from active seismic acquisition experiments in the oil industry, on a large GPU-enhanced cluster. Mesh coloring enables an efficient accumulation of degrees of freedom in the assembly process over an unstructured mesh. We use non-blocking MPI and show that computations and communications over the network and between the CPUs and the GPUs are almost fully overlapped. The GPU solver scales excellently up to 192 GPUs and achieves significant speedup over a carefully tuned equivalent CPU code. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.