Towards Petascale Earthquake Simulations


Yifeng Cui

San Diego Supercomputer Center, USA

yfcui(at)sdsc.edu

The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) conducts a collaborative, inter-disciplinary research program in earthquake system science research that makes extensive use of large-scale, physics-based, numerical modeling of earthquake phenomena.

In joint work with K. Olsen, S. Day, P. Maechling and T. Jordan of SCEC, and A. Chourasia of SDSC, we ran a set of very-large scale earthquake simulations on San Andreas Fault that we call the SCEC ShakeOut-D simulations. The ShakeOut-D exercises are to strength public awareness and readiness for "the Big One", the next great earthquake along the southern San Andreas fault. These capability simulations were scientifically and computationally challenging for several reasons including: (1) the simulations were performed for a large (600km x 300km x 80km) geographical volume, (2) the simulations were run at high resolution (100m spacing on a regular grid resulting in 14.4 billion mesh points), and (3) in order to simulate the earthquake rupture more realistically, an earthquake description based on a dynamic rupture simulation was used as a primary input to the simulation.

The simulations were coordinately executed on multiple TeraGrid systems, including the 504 teraflops Ranger system at Texas Advanced Computing Center. Coordination of high levels of expertise from many disciplines was required to solve the novel challenges that emerged when running the simulations at the large scales. The ShakeOut-D simulations are the largest and most advanced earthquake wave propagation simulations yet attempted by the SCEC research program. Hundreds of terabytes of simulation outputs were sufficiently transferred across TeraGrid sites, and the archival was then registered to SCEC digital library at SDSC, managed through the latest SDSC data management tool called iRODs (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System). The visualization movies are available at http://visservices.sdsc.edu/projects/scec/shakeout .

[PDF:1-page abstract] [PDF:presentation material]