Poster Presentation at 2014 SCEC Annual Meeting. Small, P., Taborda, R., Bielak, J., & Jordan, T. These improvements are important because they will allow us to tackle larger and more detailed problems in the future. Computationally speaking, the implementation of the GPU modules on Hercules shows performance improvements of the order of 2.5x on the overall solver execution time, and of higher factors on individual computing modules.
Results for La Habra were used for a recent verification and validation effort still underway. Our results for Chino Hills are consistent with previous simulations done using the CPU-only version of Hercules. The latest tests executed on Titan, in particular, correspond to simulations of the 2008 Chino Hills and the 2014 La Habra earthquakes.
This implementation has been tested on multiple systems with hybrid CPU-GPU architectures, including USC’s HPCC system, NCSA’s Blue Waters, and OLCF’s Titan, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. On the basis of extensive testing series comprising monotonic and reversed cyclic tests on X-lam panels, a pseudodynamic test on a one-storey X-lam specimen and 1D shaking table tests on a full-scale three-storey specimen, a full-scale seven-storey building was designed according to the European seismic standard Eurocode 8 and subjected to earthquake loading on a 3D shaking table.
Utilizing CUDA, a parallel computing platform and programming model designed to work with NVIDIA graphics processing units, several computationally intensive physics calculations within Hercules have been moved to the GPGPU, resulting in greatly improved runtime performance. Hercules has also been used in multiple verification and validation simulations led by SCEC, including the TeraShake and ShakeOut scenarios, and other historical events such as the 1994 Northridge and the 2008 Chino Hills earthquakes. In its original form, Hercules has been thoroughly tested in multiple high-performance computing systems including Kraken (NICS, now decommissioned) and Blue Waters (NCSA), where it has shown near-excellent scalability. It uses the Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries to manage inter-processor communications and an octree-based backbone to manage unstructured finite-element meshes.
Hercules is a parallel simulation code written in the standard C programing language.
In particular, we report on performance improvements achieved using GPGPU-oriented coding on Hercules, a SCEC-supported 3D earthquake ground motion simulator originally developed by the Quake Group at Carnegie Mellon University and currently part of the SEISM Project’s High-F Simulation Platform. This work describes one of the recent SCEC efforts to advance the use of general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU) in physics-based earthquake simulation software. At the end of this module students will understand how earthquakes are distributed on Earth, and how different types of plate boundaries result in different magnitudes and distributions of earthquakes.GPU Accleration of Hercules Patrick Small, Ricardo Taborda, Jacobo Bielak, & Thomas H. By teaching about earthquakes and plate tectonics using a real data set that students can visualize in three-dimensions, students learn how scientists analyze large data sets to look for patterns and test hypotheses.
For example, students can view the earth from the perspective of the entire solar system, or from one point on the Earth's surface, and can visualize how earthquakes along a fault occur through time. Although its development was hampered at. 3D visualizations allow students to examine features of the Earth from many different scales and perspectives, and to view both the space and time distributions of events. High-definition gameplay footage of id Softwares Quake, one of the first true 3D first-person shooters ever made. These 3D visualizations were designed to allow students to more easily visualize and experience complex and highly visual geologic concepts. Students learn about how and why earthquakes are distributed at plate boundaries using 3D visualizations of real data. This module series is designed to teach introductory-level college-age geology students about the basic processes and dynamics that produce earthquakes.