High Order Seismic Simulations on the Intel Xeon Phi Processor (Knights Landing)

We present a holistic optimization of the ADER-DG finite element software SeisSol targeting the Intel © Xeon Phi TM x200 processor, codenamed Knights Landing (KNL). SeisSol is a multi-physics software package performing earthquake simulations by coupling seismic wave propagation and the rupture process. The code was shown to scale beyond 1.5 million cores and achieved petascale performance when using local time stepping for the computationally heavy seismic wave propagation. Advancing further along these lines, we discuss the utilization of KNL’s core features, the exploitation of its two-level memory subsystem (which allows for efficient out-of-core implementations), and optimizations targeting at KNL’s 2D mesh on-die interconnect. Our performance comparisons demonstrate that KNL is able to outperform its previous generation, the Intel © Xeon Phi TM coprocessor x100 family, by more than 2.9 × in time-to-solution. Additionally, our results show a 3.4 × speedup compared to latest Intel © Xeon © E5v3 CPUs.