Parallel Finite Element Earthquake Rupture Simulations on Quad- and Hex-core Cray XT Systems

In this paper, we integrate a 3D mesh generator into the simulation, and use MPI to parallelize the 3D mesh generator, illustrate an element-based partitioning scheme for explicit finite element methods, and based on the partitioning scheme and what we learned from our previous work, we implement our hybrid MPI/OpenMP finite element earthquake simulation code in order to not only achieve multiple levels of parallelism of the code but also to reduce the communication overhead of MPI within a multicore node by taking advantage of the shared address space and on-chip high inter-core bandwidth and low inter-core latency. We evaluate the hybrid MPI/OpenMP finite element earthquake rupture simulations on quadand hex-core Cray XT 4/5 systems from Oak Ridge National Laboratory using the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) benchmark TPV 210. Our experimental results indicate that the parallel finite element earthquake rupture simulation obtains the accurate output results and has good scalability on these Cray XT systems.