High Performance I/O for Seismic Wave Propagation Simulations

This paper describes our research to provide high performance I/O for seismic wave propagation simulations. Earthquake early warning systems are designed to provide near real-time prediction of strong ground motion. Such systems are crucial tools for risk mitigation and disaster prevention. The ability to accurately and quickly simulate the propagation of seismic waves in complex media lies at the heart of such systems. Besides the processing requirements, it is important for seismic simulations to leverage a high-performance storage infrastructure to output results as frequently as possible, so they can be used for the decision-making process. We propose and evaluate a series of I/O optimizations to the Ondes3D seismic wave propagation simulation, considering its different types of output files separately. These optimizations are designed while keeping the previous output formats, in order not to compromise the application interaction with the other parts of the earthquake early warning system. The optimization techniques presented in this paper have provided I/O performance improvements of up to 85% and decreased the application execution time up to 70%.