Development of high-performance finite-element solver and application to seismic ground strain analysis of Tokyo

We developed a high-performance low-ordered unstructured finite-element solver for disaster mitigation simulations, and applied it to seismic ground strain analysis of Tokyo. Here we combined high performance computing methods for making a fast solver scalable up to the full K computer with 663,552 CPU cores. We also developed methods for high-performance matrix-vector computation using SIMD units and multi-cores of K computer's SPARC VIIIfx CPUs. We show an application example using full K computer simulating seismic response of a 3250 × 3250 m area of Tokyo with 40 billion degrees-of-freedom tetrahedral finite element ground model. Such simulation is expected to be useful for estimating dynamic seismic ground strain, which is a major cause of underground pipeline damage during earthquakes. Since the method is developed as a general purposed finite-element solver, it can be used for speeding up other disaster mitigation simulations in the future.