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Special Section on Parallel, Distributed, and Reconfigurable Computing, and Networking Graphics processing units (GPUs) are highly efficient architectures for parallel stencil code; however, the small device (i.e., GPU) memory capacity (several tens of GBs) necessitates the use of out-of-core computation to process excess data. Great programming effort is needed to manually implement efficient out-of-core stencil code. To relieve such programming burdens, directive-based frameworks emerged, such as the pipelined accelerator (PACC); however, they usually lack specific optimizations to reduce data transfer. In this paper, we extend PACC with two data-centric optimizations to address data transfer problems. The first is a direct-mapping scheme that eliminates host (i.e., CPU) buffers, which intermediate between the original data and device buffers. The second is a region-sharing scheme that significantly reduces host-to-device data transfer. The extended PACC was applied to an acoustic wave propagator, automatically extending the length of original serial code 2.3-fold to obtain the out-of-core code. Experimental results revealed that on a Tesla V100 GPU, the generated code ran 41.0, 22.1, and 3.6 times as fast as implementations based on Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP), Unified Memory, and the previous PACC, respectively. The generated code also demonstrated usefulness with small datasets that fit in the device capacity, running 1.3 times as fast as an in-core implementation. This study was supported in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP15H01687, JP16H02801, and JP20K21794.

Some high performance computing (HPC) applications exhibit increasing real-time requirements, which call for effective means to predict their high execution times distribution. This is a new challenge for HPC applications but a well-known problem for real-time embedded applications where solutions already exist, although they target low-performance systems running single-threaded applications. In this paper, we show how some performance validation and measurement-based practices for real-time execution time prediction can be leveraged in the context of HPC applications on high-performance platforms, thus enabling reliable means to obtain real-time guarantees for those applications. In particular, the proposed methodology uses coordinately techniques that randomly explore potential timing behavior of the application together with Extreme Value Theory (EVT) to predict rare (and high) execution times to, eventually, derive probabilistic Worst-Case Execution Time (pWCET) curves. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach for an acoustic wave inversion application used for geophysical exploration This research was funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, grant number 801137, project RECIPE

Full waveform inversion (FWI) is one of the most challenging procedures to obtain quantitative information of the subsurface. For elastic inversions, when both compressional and shear velocities have to be inverted, the algorithmic issue becomes also a computational challenge due to the high cost related to modelling elastic rather than acoustic waves. This shortcoming has been moderately mitigated by using high-performance computing to accelerate 3D elastic FWI kernels. Nevertheless, there is room in the FWI workflows for obtaining large speedups at the cost of proper grid pre-processing and data decimation techniques. In the present work, we show how by making full use of frequency-adapted grids, composite shot lists and a novel dynamic offset control strategy, we can reduce by several orders of magnitude the compute time while improving the convergence of the method in the studied cases, regardless of the forward and adjoint compute kernels used.

Summary In this work, we evaluate the effect of some traditional approaches to improve finite difference codes in NVIDIA Volta GPUs. We observe how each optimization affects the throughput of each of the regions of the algorithm. Additionally, our study covers both an evaluation of speedup for weak and strong scaling when enabling all the hardware cores available in Voltas, alongside with the resulting throughput on the Power 9 processor to which Voltas are connected and other Intel-based HPC architectures.

Many software mechanisms for geophysics exploration in oil and gas industries are based on wave propagation simulation. To perform such simulations, state-of-the-art high-performance computing architectures are employed, generating results faster with more accuracy at each generation. The software must evolve to support the new features of each design to keep performance scaling. Furthermore, it is important to understand the impact of each change applied to the software to improve the performance as most as possible. In this article, we propose several optimization strategies for a wave propagation model for six architectures: Intel Broadwell, Intel Haswell, Intel Knights Landing, Intel Knights Corner, NVIDIA Pascal, and NVIDIA Kepler. We focus on improving the cache memory usage, vectorization, load balancing, portability, and locality in the memory hierarchy. We analyze the hardware impact of the optimizations, providing insights of how each strategy can improve the performance. The results show that NVIDIA Pascal outperforms the other considered architectures by up to 8.5×. Our research received funding from the EU H2020 Programme and from MCTI/RNP-Brazil under the HPC4E project, grant agreement 689772, as well as from CNPq and Capes.

To improve the performance of stencil computations tend to be challenging due to their inherent memory access pattern. A condition that remains valid for wave propagation simulation engines. Moving towards using elastic waves instead of acoustic ones (e.g., used in medical imaging), results in computationally more expensive processes along with an increment on memory usage. Despite the computational demand, the elevated cost of exploration joined to a low success rate drove the Oil & Gas industry to rely on elastic anisotropic wave propagation models as the core of many geophysical imaging mechanisms to explore subsurface without an excessive investment. Moreover, exploration codes are expected to run fast and efficiently on modern architectures. The Intel® Xeon Phi^TM processors emerge as an energy efficient solution that provides a good trade-off between market price and computing capability. In this paper, we study the effect of several optimization techniques using the YASK framework to implement and evaluate a 25-points stencil of an elastic wave propagation engine for Intel Xeon Phi processors. The results showed improvements of up to 7× in computations and 8× in memory bandwidth with respect to the non-tuned version, reaching up to 75% of the attainable performance. We collected performance metrics for a set of the most representative optimizations and revealed the relation between each strategy and fundamental characteristics of both code and hardware.

This work shows several optimization strategies evaluated and applied to an elastic wave propagation engine, based on a Fully Staggered Grid, running on the latest Intel Xeon Phi processors, the second generation of the product (code-named Knights Landing). Our fully optimized code shows a speed-up of about 4x when compared with the same algorithm optimized for the previous generation processor. Authors also thank Repsol for the permission to publish the present research, carried out at the Repsol-BSC Research Center. This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme (2014-2020) and from the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation through Rede Nacional de Pesquisa (RNP) under the HPC4E Project (www.hpc4e.eu), grant agreement n.◦ 689772. * Other brands and names are the property of their respective owners.

The problem of anisotropic and isotropic elastic wave propagation for 3D heterogeneous media has a remarkable cost in terms of computational resources. We show the porting and optimization of elastic staggered-grid wave propagation algorithms to top-class NVIDIA Fermi GPU cards, where we obtain a 17× to 20× speed-up when compared to a single CPU core. Moreover, scalability results are shown for multi-GPU environments, key for solving industrial-size problems.

The process of high-order harmonic generation in gases is numerically investigated in the presence of a few-cycle pulsed-Bessel-beam pump, featuring a periodic modulation in the peak intensity due to large carrier-envelope-phase mismatch. A two-decade enhancement in the conversion efficiency is observed and interpreted as the consequence of a mechanism known as a nonlinearly induced modulation in the phase mismatch.

RTM was proven to be an industrial-strength application that is crucial in seismic imaging. However, it is a resource-consuming application that demands a high I/O performance. Moreover, HPC platforms are changing and the I/O structure of those systems evolve. This encourage RTM developers to take into account underlying I/O architecture in order to maximize its efficiency and hence RTM performance. Among the considerations are the kind of global and local file systems, the size of the system transfers and buffers, and the directory locking policy and data distribution. How to set those parameters are a main concern if high performance I/O has to be extracted from modern HPC systems.

We present a scheme to solve three-dimensional viscoelastic anisotropic wave propagation on structured staggered grids. The scheme uses a fully-staggered grid (FSG) or Lebedev grid (Lebedev, J Sov Comput Math Math Phys 4:449–465, 1964; Rubio et al. Comput Geosci 70:181–189, 2014), which allows for arbitrary anisotropy as well as grid deformation. This is useful when attempting to incorporate a bathymetry or topography in the model. The correct representation of surface waves is achieved by means of using high-order mimetic operators (Castillo and Grone, SIAM J Matrix Anal Appl 25:128–142, 2003; Castillo and Miranda, Mimetic discretization methods. CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2013), which allow for an accurate, compact and spatially high-order solution at the physical boundary condition. Furthermore, viscoelastic attenuation is represented with a generalized Maxwell body approximation, which requires of auxiliary variables to model the convolutional behavior of the stresses in lossy media. We present the scheme’s accuracy with a series of tests against analytical and numerical solutions. Similarly we show the scheme’s performance in high-performance computing platforms. Due to its accuracy and simple pre- and post-processing, the scheme is attractive for carrying out thousands of simulations in quick succession, as is necessary in many geophysical forward and inverse problems both for the industry and academia. The authors want to thank Repsol for the permission to publish the present research, carried out at the Repsol-BSC Research Center as a part of the Kaleidoscope Project. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 644602.

The current trend in seismic imaging aims at using an improved physical model, considering that the Earth is not rigid but an elastic body. This new model takes simulations closer to the real physics of the problem, at the cost of raising the needed computational resources. On the hardware front, recently developed high-performing devices, called accelerators or co-processors, have shown that can outperform their general purpose counterparts by orders of magnitude in terms of performance per watt. These new alternatives may then provide the necessary resources for making possible to represent complex wave physics in a reasonable time. There might be, however, a penalty associated to the usage of such devices, as some portion of the simulation code might need some re-writing or new optimization strategies explored and applied. In this work we will show some optimization strategies evaluated and applied to an elastic propagator based on a Fully Staggered Grid, running on the Intel® Xeon Phi(TM) coprocessor. It is important to remark, that the propagator is able to reproduce elastic wave propagation, even for an arbitrary anisotropy.

Traditionally, most of the literature in seismic processing area is devoted to proposals regarding the physics and numerical methods used for solving the underlying problem, such as: modellings, migrations, inversions, etc. There are, however, a lot of effort placed in the infrastructure needed to manage the processing carried out by such systems, as a lot of parallelism, fault tolerance, interaction, etc, is needed to actually produce a result. The aim of this work is to propose a framework, based on the Agile Modelling principle. Such framework, will let the developer create a modelling, migration or inversion process (among others), taking care of the topics that normally falls outside of the scope of seismic processing contributions.

The acoustic isotropic assumption for wave propagation in the subsoil has limitations, which threat to hamper the results of modern day imaging tools, such as RTM or FWI. Elasticity and anisotropy bring us closer to the real physics of the propagating waves, although at a severe computational cost. Hence, we aim at solving 3D anisotropic elastic wave propagation problems in modern HPC platforms. We require our solutions to be sufficiently accurate, efficient and highly scalable for large-scale scenarios. This condition set leads us to use multi-GPU platforms and a variety of time-domain staggered-grid finite-difference (FD) schemes.