FISH: Yury Alkhimenkov (MIT CEE)

Title: Resolving Physical Processes in Rocks using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs): From Linear Wave Phenomena to Strain Localization

Abstract
Graphical processing units (GPUs) are amongst widely employed hardware accelerators, initiating a revolution in high-performance computing (HPC) in the last decade. The three-dimensional calculations targeting billions of grid cells – technically impossible resolutions decades ago – became a reality. This major breakthrough in HPC and supercomputing comes however with the cost of developing and reengineering scientific codes to efficiently utilize the available computing power. In Earth sciences, GPU-accelerated applications target forward and inverse seismic modeling and geodynamics – fields where high spatial and temporal resolutions and large spatial domains are required. I will show a multi-GPU implementation of the anisotropic elastodynamic Biot’s equations. I will also present a numerical application based on a graphical processing unit (GPU) to resolve the strain localization in two and three dimensions. Strain localization refers to the phenomenon of strain accumulation in narrow regions which happens in rocks and in most materials. Lastly, I will propose a new physics-based approach leading to spontaneous stress drops. Such stress drops can be attributed to spontaneous earthquake nucleation.

Bio
Yury Alkhimenkov is a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yury earned his PhD (Cum Laude) at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Yury earned his MSc (Cum Laude) at the IDEA League, Joint Master’s in Applied Geophysics: TU Delft (Netherlands), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), and RWTH Aachen University (Germany). Previously he studied at the Lomonosov Moscow State University (BSc and MSc). Yury’s current research focuses on the study of induced seismicity and earthquake physics using High-Performance Computing.

About this series: MIT Earth Resources Laboratory’s Friday Informal Seminar features guest speakers from industry and academia on topics relevant to our lab, including geophysics, seismology, rock physics, imaging, inversion, machine learning, and the energy industry. Titles and abstracts will be posted here when available. Contact fish_seminar_organizers@mit.edu for more information and Zoom password.