A 14.6 billion degrees of freedom, 5 teraflops, 2.5 terabyte earthquake simulation on the Earth Simulator

Abstract

We use 1944 processors of the Earth Simulator to model seismic wave propagation resulting from large earthquakes. Simulations are conducted based upon the spectral-element method, a high-degree finite-element technique with an exactly diagonal mass matrix. We use a very large mesh with 5.5 billion grid points (14.6 billion degrees of freedom). We include the full complexity of the Earth, i.e., a three-dimensional wave-speed and density structure, a 3-D crustal model, ellipticity as well as topography and bathymetry. A total of 2.5 terabytes of memory is needed. Our implementation is purely based upon MPI, with loop vectorization on each processor. We obtain an excellent vectorization ratio of 99.3%, and we reach a performance of 5 teraflops (30% of the peak performance) on 38% of the machine. The very high resolution of the mesh allows us to perform fully three-dimensional calculations at seismic periods as low as 5 seconds.