Video: PRACE Award Winners – Sustained Petascale Seismic Simulations

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In this video from ISC’14, Alex Heinecke from Intel and Sebastian Rettenberger from the Technical University of Munich describe their award-winning paper on volcano simulation. The 2014 PRACE ISC Award winning paper was entitled: Sustained Petascale Performance of Seismic Simulations with SeisSol on SuperMUC.

Seismic simulations in realistic 3D Earth models require peta- or even exascale compute power to capture small-scale features of high relevance for scientific and industrial applications. In this paper, we present optimizations of SeisSol — a seismic wave propagation solver based on the Arbitrary high-order accurate DERivative (ADER) Discontinuous Galerkin method on fully adaptive, unstructured tetrahedral meshes — to run simulations under production conditions at petascale performance. Improvements cover the entire simulation chain: from an enhanced ADER time integration via highly scalable routines for mesh input up to hardware-aware optimization of the innermost sparse-/dense-matrix kernels. Strong and weak scaling studies on the SuperMUC machine demonstrated up to 90% parallel efficiency and 45% floating point peak efficiency on 147k cores. For a simulation under production conditions (10^8 grid cells, 4.8*10^10 degrees of freedom, 5 seconds simulated time), we achieved a sustained performance of 1.09~PFLOPS.”

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