New Software and Latest Intel Processors Help to Better Predict Earthquake Paths
Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego have developed a new seismic software package with Intel Corporation that has enabled the fastest seismic simulation to-date, as the two organizations collaborate on ways to better predict ground motions to save lives and minimize property damage.
The latest simulations, which mimic possible large-scale seismic activity in the southern California region, were done using a new software system called EDGE, for Extreme-Scale Discontinuous Galerkin Environment. The largest simulation used 612,000 Intel®Xeon Phi™ processor cores of the new Cori Phase II supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the primary scientific computing facility for the Office of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
SDSC’s ground-breaking 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. Through efficient utilization of the latest and largest supercomputers, seismologists are now able to increase the frequency content of the simulated seismic wave field.
More information can be found in SDSC's press release.