CNRS Research Director (DR CNRS)

Laboratory of Mechanics and Acoustics, CNRS/University of Aix-Marseille, France

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My name is Dimitri Komatitsch, I am a CNRS Research Director (DR CNRS) in the Laboratory of Mechanics and Acoustics at CNRS/University of Aix-Marseille, France.

My research interests include the numerical study of seismic wave propagation and adjoint/inverse problems in geological or oceanic structures, and the study of associated site effects related to steep topography and strong lateral heterogeneities. I also work on numerical modeling and imaging in the context of non destructive testing. I use a variational formulation of the equations of elastodynamics, and solve it in three dimensions (3-D) using the so-called spectral-element method, a high-order version of the finite-element method, which can be shown to be very accurate at low cost, and particularly well suited to an efficient implementation on parallel computers. This work is done in collaboration with Prof. Jeroen Tromp at Princeton University (USA) and Prof. Qinya Liu at Toronto University (Canada). We apply such numerical techniques to the study of wave propagation both at the scale of the Earth and in sedimentary basins, in particular in Southern California. The full source code of our software package SPECFEM3D is available open source from Geodynamics.org.

I also collaborate with Dominik Göddeke (Technical University of Dortmund, Germany), Gordon Erlebacher (Florida State University, USA) and David Michéa (BRGM, France) on GPU computing (i.e., computing on graphics cards) for seismic wave propagation. For more details, see our publications.

I have ongoing projects with Jesús Labarta and Rosa M. Badia (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Catalunya, Spain) on optimizing high-order finite-element codes on SMP machines. We analyze our codes using their ParaVer/DimeMás performance analysis software package.

I actively work with Roland Martin from University of Toulouse/CNRS (France) and Steven D. Gedney (University of Kentucky, USA) on optimized and stabilized unsplit Perfectly Matched Layers, called unsplit Convolutional PML (C-PML) absorbing layers, for the seismic wave equation. We have developed unsplit Convolutional PMLs for isotropic and anisotropic media (Komatitsch and Martin, 2007) using a finite-difference in the time domain (FDTD) technique based on ideas introduced by Roden and Gedney (2000) in the context of electromagnetic wave propagation. We have also applied these ideas to poroelastic media (Martin, Komatitsch and Ezziani, 2008) and developed a stabilized variational form for isotropic or strongly anisotropic media modeled using high-order finite elements (Martin, Komatitsch and Gedney, 2008). For more details about PML and C-PML, see for instance Wikipedia about PML as well as our publications. For more details about finite differences in the time domain (FDTD), see for instance Wikipedia about FDTD. All our C-PML source codes are available open source.

Our laboratory is affiliated with CNRS as a main research unit (UPR 7051). Before working in Marseille, I was a Professor at University of Pau, France from 2004 to 2010, at CNRS lab UMR 5212 (Laboratory of Modeling and Imaging in Geosciences), of which I was the Director from 2007 to 2010 and Deputy Director in 2005 and 2006; and then a Professor at University of Toulouse, France, at CNRS lab UMR 5563 (Laboratory of Geosciences and Environment).

I was also a member of Institut universitaire de France from 2007 to 2011.

With some colleagues, in 2005 we founded an INRIA research project-team called MAGIQUE-3D, led by Hélène Barucq.

I collaborated with Swaminathan Krishnan from Caltech, USA, on the study of strong ground motion in Southern California, and on the three-dimensional nonlinear analysis of buildings based on his software package Frame3D.

I also worked with Christian Gout from INSA Rouen, France, on better ways of approximating surfaces with large local variations, such as topographic and bathymetric elevation models, or complex three-dimensional geological structures with faults.

Before working in France, I was a Senior Research Fellow in Scientific Computing and Geophysics in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena, California, USA, and in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, for five years.

I am a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) and of the French Acoustical Society (SFA).

List of publications

Curriculum Vitae

SPECFEM3D software package

SEISMIC_CPML software package

INRIA équipe-projet MAGIQUE-3D

Princeton Theoretical & Computational Seismology group

ShakeMovie Caltech

Global_ShakeMovie Princeton

Genealogy: my ancestors / Généalogie: mes ancêtres

SPECFEM3D and SPECFEM3D_GLOBE are now used by many research groups worldwide:

Movie of the May 12, 2008, Sichuan (China, Ms = 8.0, Mw = 7.9) earthquake computed at CINES/GENCI (Montpellier, France) with our 3D seismic wave propagation code SPECFEM3D:

June 2010: a multi-GPU port of SPECFEM3D wins the BULL Joseph Fourier supercomputing award:

May 2005: our 3D seismic wave propagation code SPECFEM3D on the cover of "Science", for the calculation of the great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of December 26, 2004.

November 2003: SPECFEM3D wins the ACM Gordon Bell Award for Best Performance at the ACM/IEEE SuperComputing'2003 conference in Phoenix, Arizona:

Read our Gordon Bell Award paper

See the Press release

The source code of SPECFEM3D is available open source from Geodynamics.org.

Dimitri Komatitsch
Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique (LMA)
CNRS UPR 7051, Bâtiment C 3ème étage, Bureau C 356
31 chemin Joseph Aiguier
13402 Marseille cedex 20
FRANCE

For visitors, here is how to reach our building.

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(je suis français, vous pouvez m'écrire aussi en français)

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Phone: (+ 33) 4 91 16 42 03, (please use email instead if possible)
Secretary: Ms. Marie-Madeleine MORANO (+ 33) 4 91 16 40 21
Fax: (+ 33) 4 91 16 40 80.