Novel Seismic Software Sheds Light on
Earthquake Paths
Researchers achieve record performance in new seismic simulations
Earthquakes threaten lives and property all around the globe. Southern California, for example, is a very
active region with a high probability of
seismic hazards. To better understand the
probabilities and paths of earthquakes,
scientists experiment in virtual laboratories.
A key component of such a virtual
laboratory is using sophisticated software
to perform earthquake simulations. These
simulations mimic possible seismic activity,
and their accuracy is determined by a variety
of factors.
In a recent study, new seismic software,
developed by researchers both at the San
Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC
San Diego and Intel Corporation, has powered
the fastest seismic simulation to date.
Faster simulations increase the resolved
frequency range in the simulated seismic
wave field, which is one of the most important
accuracy factors. Frequency is given in Hz,
which is the number of waves passing a
fixed point per second. The need for high
frequencies is governed by engineering
requirements. While tall buildings are resonant
to comparably low frequencies, houses and
more rigid structures, such as power plants,
are sensitive to much higher frequencies.
Therefore, seismic simulations must cover a
very broad frequency band, beyond 10 Hz.
“Even on today’s largest computers,
reaching the full earthquake engineering
frequency band for a single simulation is
challenging because seismic simulations
require an immense amount of computing
resources,” said Yifeng Cui, founder and
director of SDSC’s High Performance
Geocomputing Laboratory. “Such codes
help us create simulations that can more
accurately understand ground motions
relevant for common dwellings, which is
important in engineering more earthquake-
A single earthquake simulation
covers four dimensions: the three spatial
dimensions of seismic wave propagation
and the time dimension. This means that
doubling the maximum resolved frequency
requires a 24=16-fold increase in required
computational resources.
The newly developed software package
named EDGE, for Extreme-Scale
Discontinuous Galerkin Environment, can
fully exploit the latest generation of Intel
processors. The largest simulation performed
by the researchers used 612,000 Intel Xeon
Phi processor cores on the new Cori Phase
II supercomputer at the National Energy
Research Scientific Computing Center
(NERSC), which is on the campus of the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in
Berkeley, California. NERSC is the primary
scientific computing facility for the Office
of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE).
The groundbreaking performance of 10. 4
PFLOPS (Peta FLoating-point Operations
Per Second, or one quadrillion calculations
per second) surpassed the previous seismic
record of 8. 6 PFLOPS conducted on China’s
Tianhe- 2 supercomputer. SDSC and Intel
researchers also used the DOE’s Theta
supercomputer at the Argonne National
Laboratory as part of the yearlong project.
Computational requirements of three-dimensional wave propagation simulations
are even more demanding if physics-based
seismic hazard analysis for a specific region
is considered by incorporating the laws of
physics to predict what will be in the future,
such as the densely populated area of Los
Angeles. In this case, researchers must
consider many possible future earthquake
configurations of the surrounding faults.
As an example, a different rupture of the
Southern San Andreas Fault might result
in a different ground motion, requiring the
execution of a vast number of simulations to
test as many scenarios as possible.
EDGE is designed from the bottom-up to
feature the simulation of multiple earthquake
events in one execution of the software, saving
time and costs of the simulations by exploiting
similarities in the earthquake setups.
For example, researchers could share the
mountain topography among all simulations,
if studying different ruptures of the same
fault in one execution of EDGE. Through
this unique feature, scientists will be able
to run about two to almost five times the
number of simulations using the new
software.
EDGE is part of a collaboration
announced in early 2016 under which Intel
opened a computing center at SDSC to focus
on seismic research, including the ongoing
development of computational simulations
that can be used to better inform and assist
disaster recovery and relief efforts.
The Intel Parallel Computing Center
(Intel PCC) continues an interdisciplinary
collaboration between Intel, SDSC, and
Southern California Earthquake Center
(SCEC), one of the largest open research
collaborations in geoscience. In addition
to UC San Diego, the Intel PCC at SDSC
includes researchers from the University of
Southern California (USC), San Diego State
University (SDSU), and the University of
California Riverside (UCR).
The multi-institution study which led to the
record results includes Breuer and Cui as well
as Alexander Heinecke, a research scientist
at Intel Labs. The scientific publication
is titled “EDGE: Extreme Scale Fused
Seismic Simulations with the Discontinuous
Galerkin Method” and will be presented
at the International Supercomputing High
Performance Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt,
Germany. The work was supported by SCEC
and the Intel PCC initiative.
— Alexander Breuer, Ph.D.
University of California, San Diego
San Diego Supercomputer Center