Implicit Low-Order Unstructured Finite-Element Multiple Simulation Enhanced by Dense Computation using OpenACC

TL;DR

This paper presents a GPU-accelerated low-order finite-element solver for rapid multiple crust deformation simulations, achieving significant speedups with minimal development effort, enabling more reliable geophysical analyses.

Contribution

The paper introduces a GPU-optimized finite-element solver with OpenACC, achieving high speedups for large-scale crust deformation simulations with low development cost.

Findings

Speedup of 14.2x on P100 GPUs compared to CPU-based systems

Additional 2.45x speedup on V100 GPUs over P100 GPUs

Successful computation of 368 deformation cases with 400 million degrees of freedom

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a low-order three-dimensional finite-element solver for fast multiple-case crust deformation analysis on GPU-based systems. Based on a high-performance solver designed for massively parallel CPU based systems, we modify the algorithm to reduce random data access, and then insert OpenACC directives. The developed solver on ten Reedbush-H nodes (20 P100 GPUs) attained speedup of 14.2 times from 20 K computer nodes, which is high considering the peak memory bandwidth ratio of 11.4 between the two systems. On the newest Volta generation V100 GPUs, the solver attained a further 2.45 times speedup from P100 GPUs. As a demonstrative example, we computed 368 cases of crustal deformation analyses of northeast Japan with 400 million degrees of freedom. The total procedure of algorithm modification and porting implementation took only two weeks; we can see that high performance improvement was achieved with low development cost. With the developed solver, we can expect improvement in reliability of crust-deformation analyses by many-case analyses on a wide range of GPU-based systems.