Section: Software

SPECFEM3D

The Magique-3D  project is based (in part) on existing software packages, which are already validated, portable and robust. The SPECFEM3D software package, developed by Dimitri Komatitsch and his colleagues in collaboration with Jeroen Tromp and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and at Princeton University (USA), and which is still actively maintained by Dimitri Komatitsch and his colleagues, allows the precise modeling of seismic wave propagation in complex three-dimensional geological models. Phenomena such as anisotropy, attenuation (i.e., anelasticity), fluid-solid interfaces, rotation, self-gravitation, as well as crustal and mantle models can be taken into account. The software is written in Fortran95 with MPI message-passing on parallel machines. It won the Gordon Bell Prize for best performance of the Supercomputing'2003 conference. In 2006, Dimitri Komatitsch established a new collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain) to work on further optimizing the source code to prepare it for very large runs on future petaflops machines to solve either direct or inverse problems in seismology. Optimizations have focused on improving load balancing, reducing the number of cache misses and switching from blocking to non-blocking MPI communications to improve performance on very large systems. Because of its flexibility and portability, the code has been run successfully on a large number of platforms and is used by more than 150 academic institutions around the world. In November 2008 this software package was again among the six finalists of the pretigious Gordon Bell Prize of the SuperComputing'2008 conference in the USA [50] for a calculation performed in parallel on 150,000 processor cores, reaching a sustained performance level of 0.16 petaflops.