Accelerating the discontinuous Galerkin method for seismic wave propagation simulations using the graphic processing unit (GPU)—single-GPU implementation

We have successfully ported an arbitrary high-order discontinuous Galerkin (ADER-DG) method for solving the three-dimensional elastic seismic wave equation on unstructured tetrahedral meshes to an Nvidia Tesla C2075 GPU using the Nvidia CUDA programming model. On average our implementation obtained a speedup factor of about 24.3 for the single-precision version of our GPU code and a speedup factor of about 12.8 for the double-precision version of our GPU code when compared with the double precision serial CPU code running on one Intel Xeon W5880 core. When compared with the parallel CPU code running on two, four and eight cores, the speedup factor of our single-precision GPU code is around 12.9, 6.8 and 3.6, respectively. In this article, we give a brief summary of the ADER-DG method, a short introduction to the CUDA programming model and a description of our CUDA implementation and optimization of the ADER-DG method on the GPU. To our knowledge, this is the first study that explores the potential of accelerating the ADER-DG method for seismic wave-propagation simulations using a GPU.