Sustained performance of 10+ teraflop/s in simulation on seismic waves using 507 nodes of the earth simulator

Abstract

Earthquakes are very large scale ruptures inside the Earth and generate elastic waves, known as seismic waves, which propagate inside the Earth. We use a Spectral-Element Method implemented on the Earth Simulator in Japan to calculate seismic waves generated by recent large earthquakes. The spectral-element method is based on a weak formulation of the equations of motion and has both the flexibility of a finite-element method and the accuracy of a pseudospectral method. We perform numerical simulation of seismic wave propagation for a fully three-dimensional Earth model, which incorporates realistic 3D variations of Earth's internal properties. The simulations are performed on 4056 processors, which require 507 out of 640 nodes of the Earth Simulator. We use a mesh with 206 million spectral-elements, for a total of 13.8 billion global integration grid points (i.e., almost 37 billion degrees of freedom). We show examples of simulations and demonstrate that the synthetic seismic waves computed by this numerical technique match with the observed seismic waves accurately. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.