Towards Porting a Real-World Seismological Application to the Intel MIC Architecture

This whitepaper aims to discuss first experiences with porting an MPI-based real-world geophysical application to the new Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture. The selected code SeisSol is an application written in Fortran that can be used to simulate earthquake rupture and radiating seismic wave propagation in complex 3-D heterogeneous materials. The PRACE prototype cluster EURORA at CINECA, Italy, was accessed to analyse the MPI-performance of SeisSol on Intel Xeon Phi on both single- and multi-coprocessor level. The whitepaper presents detailed scaling results on EURORA and compares them with the SandyBridge-based HPC system SuperMUC at LRZ at Garching near Munich, Germany. The work was done in a PRACE Preparatory Access project within the PRACE-1IP extension.