Extreme Scale Multi-Physics Simulations of the Tsunamigenic 2004 Sumatra Megathrust Earthquake

Abstract

We present a high-resolution simulation of the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, including non-linear frictional failure on a megathrust-splay fault system. Our method exploits unstructured meshes capturing the complicated geometries in subduction zones that are crucial to understand large earthquakes and tsunami generation. These up-to-date largest and longest dynamic rupture simulations enable analysis of dynamic source effects on the seafloor displacements. To tackle the extreme size of this scenario an end-to-end optimization of the simulation code SeisSol was necessary. We implemented a new cache-aware wave propagation scheme and optimized the dynamic rupture kernels using code generation. We established a novel clustered local-time-stepping scheme for dynamic rupture. In total, we achieved a speed-up of 13.6 compared to the previous implementation. For the Sumatra scenario with 221 million elements this reduced the time-to-solution to 13.9 hours on 86,016 Haswell cores. Furthermore, we used asynchronous output to overlap I/O and compute time. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Earth and atmospheric sciences;