Specfem3D Globe

As part of the Montblanc project, I work on the porting of SPECFEM 3D Globe from OpenCL to CUDA. Then I performed an in-depth study of its performance on the energy-efficient Montblanc cluster. SPECFEM3D Globe is an HPC scientific code that simulates seismic wave propagation at the local or regional scale based upon spectral-element method (SEM) with very good accuracy and convergence properties.

The OpenCL port was merged in the upstream git:

  • add OpenCL support to SPECFEM3D_GLOBE [GitHub]

The performance study was published as a public deliverable of the project:

  • D4.4/5, 2.8 SPECFEM3D [PDF]

For the benchmarking, SPECFEM3D was configured to simulate a regional-scale Greek earthquake. It ran over one or two cores, with or without GPU acceleration, on 128 ARM nodes.

We studied the weak and strong scaling, as well as the energy consumption profile of the cluster.

Specfem3D Performance Study