Extreme-scale earthquake simulations on Sunway TaihuLight

Haohuan Fu, Bingwei Chen, Wenqiang Zhang, Zhenguo Zhang, Wei Zhang, Guangwen Yang, Xiaofei Chen
2019 CCF Transactions on High Performance Computing  
Earthquakes, as one of the most disruptive natural hazards, have been a major research target for generations of scientists. Numerical simulation of earthquakes, as one of the few methods to verify and improve scientists' understanding about the earthquake process, and a key tool in various earthquake engineering applications, has long been both an important and challenging application on supercomputers. In this paper, we discuss the major challenges for developing an accurate earthquake
more » ... ion tool on supercomputers. Based on the discussion, we then demonstrate our efforts on performing extreme-scale earthquake simulations on Sunway TaihuLight, a 125-Pflops machine with over 10 million heterogeneous cores. With systematic approaches to resolve the memory bandwidth constraint, we manage to achieve 8% to 16% efficiency for utilizing the entire machine to simulate Tangshan and Wenchuan Earthquakes with an unprecedented spatial resolution.
doi:10.1007/s42514-019-00004-w fatcat:cir6titikrbrlnzeyymldkifj4