Patus for convenient high-performance stencils: Evaluation in earthquake simulations

PATUS is a code generation and auto-tuning framework for stencil computations targeting modern multi and many-core processors. The goals of the framework are productivity and portability for achieving high performance on the target platform. Its stencil specification language allows the programmer to express the computation in a concise way independently of hardware architecture-specific details. Thus, it increases the programmer productivity by removing the need for manual low-level tuning. We illustrate the impact of the stencil code generation in seismic applications, for which both weak and strong scaling are important. We evaluate the performance by focusing on a scalable discretization of the wave equation and testing complex simulation types of the AWP-ODC code to aim at excellent parallel efficiency, preparing for petascale 3-D earthquake calculations.