Simulating the Wenchuan Earthquake with Accurate Surface Topography on Sunway TaihuLight

Authors: Bingwei Chen (Tsinghua University; National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi), Haohuan Fu (Tsinghua University; National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi), Yanwen Wei (Tsinghua University; National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi), Conghui He (Tsinghua University; National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi), Wenqiang Zhang (University of Science and Technology of China), Yuxuan Li (Tsinghua University; National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi), Wubin Wan (National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi), Wei Zhang (National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi), Lin Gan (Tsinghua University; National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi), Wei Zhang (Southern University of Science and Technology, China), Zhenguo Zhang (Southern University of Science and Technology, China), Guangwen Yang (Tsinghua University; National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi), Xiaofei Chen (Southern University of Science and Technology, China)

Abstract: This paper reports our efforts on performing 50-m resolution earthquake simulation of the Wenchuan Earthquake (Ms 8.0, China) on Sunway TaihuLight. To accurately capture the surface topography, we adopt a curvilinear grid finite-difference method with a traction image free surface implementation and redesign the algorithm to reduce memory access costs for heterogeneous many-core architectures. We then derive a performance model of our algorithm to guide and drive the further optimization and tuning of various parameters using a genetic algorithm. A data layout transformation is also proposed to improve the direct memory access (DMA) efficiency further. Our efforts improve the simulation efficiency from 0.05% to 7.6%, with a sustained performance of 9.07 Pflops using the entire machine of the Sunway TaihuLight (over 10 million cores), and a large-scale simulation of the Wenchuan earthquake with accurate surface topography and improved coda wave effects.




Back to Technical Papers Archive Listing