Exploiting the Performance Potential of Extreme-Scale Earthquake Simulation: Achieving 86.7 PFLOPS With Over 39 Million Cores

Leveraging the latest Sunway supercomputer, we developed a fully optimized earthquake simulation model that accurately captures topographic effects for realistic seismic analysis. Optimizing for the SW26010Pro architecture with DMA/RMA communication mechanisms, data compression schemes, and vectorization, we achieved a speedup exceeding 160×. Our pipeline-based computation and communication overlapping scheme, combined with performance prediction models further minimized computational costs. These optimizations enabled the largest-scale curvilinear grid finite-difference method (CGFDM) earthquake simulations to date, covering 197 trillion grid points and achieving 86.7 PFLOPS on 39 million cores with a weak scaling efficiency of 97.9%. These advancements enabled the successful simulation of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, providing high-resolution seismic insights and robust assessments for regional hazard mitigation and disaster preparedness.