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Section site map: News |
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NewsWhen the Earth shakesEarthquake research teams use TeraGrid resources to realistically simulate soil vibration during major quakes. Download a pdf of the print version.
PSC staff are developing user-friendly visualization tools to compare results from Hercules with TeraShake, earthquake simulation software developed at SCEC. To show how and why the two programs differ is important for validation of their results. This graphic shows the displacment from soil vibration in a Hercules run (above) compared to the same region from a TeraShake run (below). Image courtesy of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. A basic goal of earthquake research is to know how the Earth will shake. "Even from one city block to the next, the level of shaking can change dramatically due to subsurface soil and the nature of the seismic waves," says Jacobo Bielak, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Bielak and colleague David O'Hallaron lead the Quake Project, a large collaborative research team that uses sophisticated computational methods to create realistic 3D models of earthquakes. In collaboration with the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), their work aims to provide information that will result in seismic provisions in building codes that will ensure the safest possible structures at reasonable cost. SCEC and the Quake Project rely heavily on TeraGrid resources. In November 2006, the Quake team won the Analytics Challenge Award at SC06 in Tampa for "Hercules"-software that coordinates all the stages of very large-scale earthquake simulation, from problem definition to final visualization. With this unified framework, all tasks-building a software mesh that subdivides the subsurface region, partitioning the job among hundreds or thousands of processors, the simulation itself, and visualizing results-are performed in place on the processors of a supercomputer. Relying on innovative software developed at PSC, Hercules can visualize results in real time as a simulation is running.
Jacobo Bielak, left, and David O'Hallaron. Photo credit: Annie O'Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In December 2006, the Quake team used Hercules with 2,048 processors of PSC's Cray XT3 for an unprecedented computation, simulating a magnitude 7.7 quake along the San Andreas fault at high-frequency vibration (one cycle per second) and realistic soil properties. Higher frequencies greatly increase the size of the computation but are important because they help represent the structures that present the greatest danger. This Hercules simulation showed specifics on how ground motion selects a propagation path and affects some areas more than others. More informationhttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/ |
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The TeraGrid project is funded by the National Science Foundation and includes 11 partners: Please email help@teragrid.org with questions or comments or out the convenient online feedback form. This site is XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS, & Section 508 compliant. |
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