Earthquake Ground Motion Modeling on Parallel Computers

        Hesheng Bao, Jacobo Bielak, Omar Ghattas, David R. O'Hallaron,
          Loukas F. Kallivokas, Jonathan Richard Shewchuk, Jifeng Xu
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering / School of Computer Science
                         Carnegie Mellon University
                       Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

We describe the design and discuss the performance of a parallel elastic
wave propagation simulator that is being used to model earthquake-induced
ground motion in large sedimentary basins.  The components of the system
include mesh generators, a mesh partitioner, a parceler, and a parallel code
generator, as well as parallel numerical methods for applying seismic
forces, incorporating absorbing boundaries, and solving the discretized wave
propagation problem.  We discuss performance on the Cray T3D for unstructured
mesh wave propagation problems of up to 77 million tetrahedra. By paying
careful attention to each step of the process, we obtain excellent
performance despite the highly irregular structure of the problem.  The mesh
generator, partitioner, parceler, and code generator collectively form an
integrated toolset called Archimedes, which automates the solution of
unstructured mesh PDE problems on parallel computers, and is being used for
other unstructured mesh applications beyond ground motion modeling.


Supercomputing '96 (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), November 1996.
PostScript (color, 9,370k, 19 pages).


BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{quake96,
author = {Hesheng Bao and Jacobo Bielak and Omar Ghattas and David R.
  O'Hallaron and Loukas F. Kallivokas and Jonathan Richard Shewchuk and
  Jifeng Xu},
title = {Earthquake {G}round {M}otion {M}odeling on {P}arallel {C}omputers},
booktitle = {Supercomputing '96},
address = {Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania},
month = nov,
year = 1996
}