ESFLOW: Mapping Large-Scale Earthquake Simulation to Spatial Computing Systems

In the last ten years, the frequent earthquakes have pushed the experts to watch the earth’s movements more closely. Fortunately, recent enhancements in modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) power help researchers understand the internal earthquake mechanisms using the numerical simulation method. Considering the performance and energy requirements, specialized FPGA-based accelerators have become a promising solution for high-performance earthquake simulation. In this work, we propose a resource-aware decomposition framework of earthquake simulation based on an analytic resource model. Then, we demonstrate our efforts in computation design to ensure continuous streaming operation and prevent deadlocks. Compared with the floating-point implementation based on NVIDIA GPU A6000, our design is 1.6 times and 3.4 times better in performance and energy efficiency, respectively.