Porting a high-order finite-element earthquake modeling application to NVIDIA graphics cards using CUDA

We port a high-order finite-element application that performs the numerical simulation of seismic wave propagation resulting from earthquakes in the Earth on NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and GTX 280 graphics cards using CUDA. This application runs in single precision and is therefore a good candidate for implementation on current GPU hardware, which either does not support double precision or supports it but at the cost of reduced performance. We discuss and compare two implementations of the code: one that has maximum efficiency but is limited to the memory size of the card, and one that can handle larger problems but that is less efficient. We use a coloring scheme to handle efficiently summation operations over nodes on a topology with variable valence. We perform several numerical tests and performance measurements and show that in the best case we obtain a speedup of 25.