With help from DOE supercomputers, a USC-led team expands models of the fault system beneath its feet, aiming to predict its outbursts. For their 2020 INCITE work, SCEC scientists and programmers will have access to 500,000 node hours on Argonne’s Theta supercomputer, delivering as much as 11.69 petaflops. “The team is using Theta “mostly for dynamic earthquake ruptures,” Goulet says. “That is using physics-based models to simulate and understand details of the earthquake as it ruptures along a fault, including how the rupture speed and the stress along the fault plane changes.”