Geodynamic code development

Eunseo Choi
Dec 13, 2023 research, geodynamic code development
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Three-dimensional model for core complex formation created with DES3D. Accelerated on NVidia V100 graphics card.

The main goal of this project is to improve DES3D (Dynamic Earth Solver in 3D), an open-source geodynamic modeling code. in terms of the types of physical processes it can model and the speed

Performance

DES3D has been enabled to run on NVIDIA GPUs. Kernel functions for the main routines have been written in CUDA. The overall parallelization is illustrated in the figure below.

How DES3D works when using GPU
How DES3D works when using GPU
When run on GPU, a three-dimensional model for core complex formation showed speedup of 40-60 relative to the performance on a 16-thread CPU. The speedup varies according to the problem size, which tends to increase over the course due to mesh refinement.
Core complex model and performance on GPU relative to CPU
Core complex model and performance on GPU relative to CPU
This video shows the code in action.

Functionality

To extend DES3D’s functionality, we are focusing on merging the exploratory work on implementing the rate-and-state fricgtion law by Tong and Lavier (Nature Comm., 2018). With this new friction law, we can better model an entire earthquake cycle as well as the consequences of its numerous repetition.

Earthquake cycles modeled with a rate-and-friction law implemented in DES3D
Earthquake cycles modeled with a rate-and-friction law implemented in DES3D

DES3D High-Performance Computing GPU Non-linear rheologies rate-and-state friction Adaptive Mesh Refinement
Eunseo Choi
Eunseo Choi
Associate Professor of Geophysics

My research interests include long- and short-term tectonic modeling and seismotectonics.