Steering and in-situ visualization for simulation of seismic wave propagation on graphics cards

Abstract

Simulation of large scale seismic wave propagation is an important tool in seismology for efficient strong motion analysis and risk mitigation. Being particularly CPU-consuming, this three-dimensional problem has been early ported on graphics cards to improve the performance by several order of magnitude. Scientific visualization of data produced by these simulations is essential for a good comprehension of the physical phenomena involved. In the same time, post-petascale architectures demonstrates that the I/O turn to become a major performance bottleneck. This situation is worsened with GPU-based systems because of the gap between I/O bandwidth and computational capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a prototype of computational steering and in-situ visualization suitable for seismic wave propagation on hybrid architecture. We detail the overall architecture of the system we set up and comment on the parallel performance measured. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.