Section site map: News

• News Home
• Media Press Room
• User/System News

2005 News Stories

• GADU/GNARE Uses TeraGrid For Protein Sequence Analysis
• TeraGyroid: Gyroids on the TeraGrid
• TeraShake: Simulating a Big Shake in Southern California Basins
• Seismic Modeling and Oil Reservoir Simulations with TeraGrid
• Improving Groundwater Cleanup Decision-Making with TeraGrid
• Harnessing TeraGrid to the Sky: Understanding Dark Energy
• AMANDA and TeraGrid: Exploring the Violent Universe
• TeraGrid Science Gateways: NanoHUB
• Identifying Brain Disorders with TeraGrid

News

TeraShake: Simulating a Big Shake in Southern California Basins

In a large collaborative effort led by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) and involving many groups around the country, TeraGrid resources enabled researchers to manage 47 Terabytes of data from a simulation of a magnitude 7.7 simulated earthquake. The southern part of the San Andreas fault in California has not seen a major earthquake since 1680, and accumulated stress could lead to an event as large as magnitude 7.7, with six meters of ground movement. The researchers sought to explore the impact of such a large magnitude temblor on Southern California’s deep, sediment-filled basins - the Santa Clara Valley, the Los Angeles basin, and the Imperial and Coachella Valleys. The goal is to help scientists estimate the ground velocities that can be expected to shake buildings and highlight which regions will be hit hardest under various scenarios.

For realistic results, the researchers needed to capture the entire region in their model-a volume 600 kilometers long by 300 kilometers wide and 80 km deep that includes all major population centers in Southern California. The simulation was carried out (on the SDSC DataStar) by dividing the volume into 1.8 billion cubes 200 meters on a side. This produced unprecedented amounts of data - some 47 terabytes - equivalent to more than four times the printed collection of the entire Library of Congress.

"To understand big earthquakes we need as much detail as possible", said J. Bernard Minster of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, a project co-PI. "And this means massive amounts of data." The TeraGrid Storage Area Network (SAN) was used to stage and move the data at the record rate of 10 terabytes per day from the simulation to a SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB) collection in archival storage, where the data was kept for analysis and further research. The TeraGrid SRB data architecture allows the researchers to transparently and quickly access their data archive at SDSC from any TeraGrid site, giving important flexibility to their research. Preliminary results from analysis of the data show directional effects larger than previously anticipated, indicating that some forms of rupture pose enormous hazards to Mexicali, a city of over 2 million people.

Figure 1: Peak velocities of ground motion in SCEC simulation of a magnitude 7.7 earthquake. Image credit: SCEC/CME, Amit Chourasia and Reza Wahadj, SDSC.

More News Releases

Top