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Very few things in life are certain. If you live in Southern California, however, rest assured that some time in the next few decades you will experience an earthquake of significant magnitude. And while the disaster itself is probably unavoidable, knowing which areas will be most affected can do a great deal to mitigate the aftermath. For example, where will the strongest ground movement occur, and how long will the shaking last? Obviously, when it comes to new construction in an area with a high probability of an earthquake in the relatively near future, this knowledge is invaluable. Engineers crave this sort of data when they are designing the buildings of tomorrow. Enter the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), an institution funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U. S. Geological Survey in recognition of the seismic hazard that looms over Southern California like the heavy Los Angeles smog. In an effort to better understand when and where the next Big One will hit hardest, SCEC is taking advantage of the recently launched, NSF-funded supercomputer known as Kraken.
Located at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and managed by the University of Tennessee, Kraken is the world’s fastest academic supercomputer with a peak performance of more than 607 teraflops, or 607 trillion calculations per second. To simulate the Big One, scientists need a big computer. The image above shows the results of two types of simulations combined. The fault surface divides the map of southern California into two parts. The colors on the surface show where on the fault surface slip is occurring, as calculated by the dynamic rupture simulation. Colors on the map surface show earthquake waves propagating away from the fault and the ground velocities produced by the fault slip. LiveScience created a feature video showcasing the simulation in action. See the video at: http://www.livescience.com/common/media/video/player.php?aid=2738. The original simulation, an exceptionally large file, can be seen at: http://visservices.sdsc.edu/projects/scec/shakeout/SO2.g3d7/movies/SO2.g3d7_640.mov. The animation shows earthquake wave propagation effects from a potential magnitude 7.8 earthquake in the southern California region. The visualization is based on 11.8 TB of earthquake simulation data from the state-of-the-art earthquake simulation performed on NSF TeraGrid computing resources. Source : Live Science |
