Steering and In-situ Visualization for Simulation of Seismic Wave Propagation on Graphics Cards

Abstract : Simulation of large scale seismic wave propagation is an important tool in seismology for efficient strong motion analysis and risk mitigation. Being particularly CPU-consuming, this three-dimensional problem has been early ported on graphics cards to improve the performance by several order of magnitude. Scientific visualization of data produced by these simulations is essential for a good comprehension of the physical phenomena involved. In the same time, post-petascale architectures demonstrates that the I/O turn to become a major performance bottleneck. This situation is worsened with GPU-based systems because of the gap between I/O bandwidth and computational capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a prototype of computational steering and in-situ visualization suitable for seismic wave propagation on hybrid architecture. We detail the overall architecture of the system we set up and comment on the parallel performance measured