Student Cluster Competition 2018, team NTHU: Reproducing performance of multi-physics simulations of the tsunamigenic 2004 sumatra megathrust earthquake on the Intel Skylake architecture

• Published in: Parallel computing 2019-12, Vol.90, p.102569, Article 102569
• Main Authors: Lin, ShaoFu, Yang, ChiChen, Cheng, YuHsuan, Hsu, KengJui, Chen, HungHsin, Lin, YuanChing, Chou, Jerry
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Earthquake simulation; Reproducibility; Scalability
• ISSN: 0167-8191; 1872-7336
• DOI: 10.1016/j.parco.2019.102569

As a special activity of the Student Cluster Competition at SC18 conference, we made an attempt to reproduce the performance evaluations of an optimized version of earthquake simulation software SeisSol. Our experiments were conducted on a small scale 4-node cluster with Intel Skylake CPU architecture, while the performance numbers of the original work [19] were collected from a large scale 3000-node supercomputer with Intel Haswell CPU architecture. Both single node performance and cluster scalability are presented and compared in this work. Overall, we also observed significant time-to-solution reductions from the optimized SeisSol code compared to the non-optimized baseline version. Specifically, the original work achieved a 13.6 speedup on a 221 million elements dataset, and we obtained a 4.77 speedup on a 125 thousand elements dataset. But due to the differences between the scale of cluster size and data size as well as the CPU architecture, we did find different behaviors and trends in terms of the performance scalability and computing flops in certain cases. Hence, this work shares our experiences and observations from our reproducibility activity and discuss our findings.