High Performance Computing for Geophysics Applications

Objective:

Simulating large-scale geophysics phenomenon represents, more than ever, a major concern for our society. Recent seismic activity worldwide has shown how crucial it is to enhance our understanding of the impact of earthquakes. Numerical modelling of seismic 3D waves obviously requires highly specific research efforts in geophysics and applied mathematics, leveraging a mix of various schemes such as spectral elements, high-order finite differences or finite elements. But designing and porting geophysics applications on top of nowadays supercomputers also requires a strong expertise in parallel programming and the use of appropriate runtime systems able to efficiently deal with heterogeneous architectures featuring many-core nodes typically equipped with GPU accelerators. The HPC-GA project aims at evaluating the functionalities provided by current runtime systems in order to point out their limitations. It also aims at designing new methods and mechanisms for an efficient scheduling of processes/threads and a clever data distribution on such platforms. The HPC-GA project is unique in gathering an international, pluridisciplinary consortium of leading European and South American researchers featuring complementary expertise to face the challenge of designing high performance geophysics simulations for parallel architectures: UFRGS, INRIA, BCAM and UNAM. Results of this project will be validated using data collected from real sensor networks. Results will be widely disseminated through high-quality publications, workshops and summer-schools.