Accelerating a 3D Finite-Difference Earthquake Simulation with a C-to-CUDA Translator

GPUs provide impressive computing power, but GPU programming can be challenging. Here, an experience in porting real-world earthquake code to Nvidia GPUs is described. Specifically, an annotation-based programming model, called Mint, and its accompanying source-to-source translator are used to automatically generate CUDA source code and simplify the exploration of performance tradeoffs.