Hesheng Bao
Computational Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
hbao@cs.cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/hbao/www/home.html
Jacobo Bielak
Computational Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
bielak@cs.cmu.edu
http://www.ce.cmu.edu/user/faculty/bielak.html
Omar Ghattas
Computational Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
oghattas@cs.cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/
Loukas F. Kallivokas
Computational Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
loukas@cs.cmu.edu
David R. O'Hallaron
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
droh@cs.cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/
Jonathan Richard Shewchuk
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
jrs@cs.cmu.edu
Jifeng Xu
Computational Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
jxu@cs.cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/jxu/www/documents/home.html
Abstract. We describe the design and discuss the performance of a parallel elastic wave propagation simulator that is being used to model earthquake-induced ground motion in large sedimentary basins. The components of the system include mesh generators, a mesh partitioner, a parceler, and a parallel code generator, as well as parallel numerical methods for applying seismic forces, incorporating absorbing boundaries, and solving the discretized wave propagation problem. We discuss performance on the Cray T3D for unstructured mesh wave propagation problems of up to 77 million tetrahedra. By paying careful attention to each step of the process, we obtain excellent performance despite the highly irregular structure of the problem. The mesh generator, partitioner, parceler, and code generator collectively form an integrated toolset called Archimedes, which automates the solution of unstructured mesh PDE problems on parallel computers, and is being used for other unstructured mesh applications beyond ground motion modeling.
Keywords. absorbing boundaries, computational geometry, finite element methods, local site effects, mesh generation, parallel unstructured PDE solvers, parallelizing compilers, seismic wave propagation, strong ground motion.