Scaling evalutation of the lattice solid model on the SGI Altix 3700 [evalutation read evaluation]

The lattice solid model is a particle based method which has been successfully employed for simulating the fracturing of rocks, the dynamics of faults, earthquakes and gouge processes. However, results from initial simulations demonstrate that models consisting of only thousands of particles are inadequate to accurately reproduce the micro-physics of seismic phenomenon. Instead, models with millions or tens of millions of particles are required to produce realistic simulations. Parallel computing architectures, such as the SGI Altix 3700, provide the opportunity to solve much larger computational problems than traditional single processor systems. In order to take advantage of high performance systems, a message passing interface version of the lattice solid model has been implemented. Benchmarks, presented in this paper, demonstrate an 80% parallel efficiency for the parallel lattice solid model on 128 processors of the SGI Altix 3700. These results, for a two-dimensional wave propagation problem, indicate the potential for the lattice solid model to simulate more computationally challenging three-dimensional geophysical processes.