Low-ordered Orthogonal Voxel Finite Element with INT8 Tensor Cores for GPU-based Explicit Elastic Wave Propagation Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-optimized explicit elastic wavefield simulation method using low-ordered orthogonal voxel finite elements and INT8 Tensor Cores, significantly reducing numerical dispersion and achieving 17-fold speedup over traditional approaches.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel GPU-based simulation method that leverages INT8 Tensor Cores and low-ordered orthogonal voxel finite elements to accelerate elastic wave propagation analysis.

Findings

Achieved 17x speedup compared to conventional methods.

Reduced numerical dispersion in wavefield simulations.

Demonstrated effectiveness on real-world problems.

Abstract

Faster explicit elastic wavefield simulations are required for large and complex three-dimensional media using a structured finite element method. Such wavefield simulations are suitable for GPUs, which have exhibited improved computational performance in recent years, and the use of GPUs is expected to speed up such simulations. However, available computational performance on GPUs is typically not fully exploited, and the conventional method involves some numerical dispersion. Thus, in this paper, we propose an explicit structured-mesh wavefield simulation method that uses INT8 Tensor Cores and reduces numerical dispersion to speed up computation on GPUs. The proposed method was implemented for GPUs, and its performance was evaluated in a simulation experiment of a real-world problem. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is 17.0 times faster than the conventional method.