‘Let’s Talk Exascale’: How Supercomputing Is Shaking Up Earthquake Science

Supercomputing is bringing seismic change to earthquake science. A field that historically has predicted by looking back now is moving forward with HPC and physics-based models to comprehensively simulate the earthquake process, end to end. In this episode of the “Let’s Talk Exascale” podcast series from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), David McCallen, leader of ECP’s Earthquake Sim (EQSIM) subproject, discusses his team’s work to help improve the design of more quake-resilient buildings and bridges.

Petascale Research in Earthquake Science on Blue Waters

“SCEC’s multi-disciplinary research team is using NCSA Blue Waters to develop physics-based computational models of earthquake processes. During the past year, we integrated more realistic physics into our computational software to model frequency dependent attenuation, small-scale heterogeneities, free-surface topography, and non-linear yielding effects, all of which become increasingly important when simulating high frequency ground motions.”

Oakley Cluster Powers Satellite Surface Mapping for Disaster Relief in Nepal

Researchers are using supercomputer automated surface mapping technology to help with disaster relief and longer-term stabilization planning efforts related to the recent earthquake in Nepal.

SGI Powers Earthquake Research in Japan

Today SGI announced that the Earthquake and Volcano Information Center of the Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) at the University of Tokyo, has deployed a large-scale parallel computing solution from SGI for leading-edge seismological and volcanological research.