ACcESS MNRF

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 simu-lations demonstrate that models consisting of only thou-sands of particles are inadequate to accurately reproduce the micro-physics of seismic phenomenon. Instead, mod-els with millions or tens of millions of particles are re-quired to produce realistic simulations. Parallel comput-ing architectures, such as the SGI Altix 3700, provide the opportunity to solve much larger computational prob-lems than traditional single processor systems. In order to take advantage of high performance systems, a Mes-sage Passing Interface version of the Lattice Solid Model has been implemented. Benchmarks, presented in this pa-per, demonstrate an 80 % parallel efficiency for the par-allel 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 Lat-tice Solid Model to simulate more computationally chal-lenging three-dimensional geophysical processes. 1