Blue Waters Project

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Current SCEC PRAC Project Description (2017 - 2019)

  • Improving Earthquake Forecasting and Seismic Hazard Analysis Through Extreme-Scale Simulations (ACI – 1713792).
  • NSF Web Site Description

Investigator(s): Thomas Jordan tjordan@usc.edu (Principal Investigator)

  • Philip Maechling (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Kim Olsen (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Yifeng Cui (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Ricardo Taborda (Co-Principal Investigator)

ABSTRACT

Earthquakes emerge from complex, multiscale interactions across time scales that range from milliseconds to millions of years within active faults systems that are incredibly difficult to observe. Large-scale physics-based earthquake simulations are essential scientific tools that can be used to better understand these hazardous natural phenomena. This project will develop physics-based codes for simulating earthquakes on Blue Waters and apply these simulation capabilities to improve existing hazard analysis methods. The very large scale computing and data management capabilities of the Blue Waters system will allow the project to develop and test earthquake models that capture physics in a more realistic manner, and to run simulations at finer resolutions and higher frequencies. The results will better quantify seismic hazards and their uncertainties.

This project will advance physics-based probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) methods using numerical experimentation and large-scale simulations to increase the scale range in current representations of source physics, anelasticity, and geologic heterogeneity. Specifically, the research project will work towards seven computational objectives defined to improve our understanding of earthquake processes and advance physics-based PSHA: (1) Develop an empirically-calibrated physics-based earthquake forecast. (2) Develop a statistically sufficient, but reduced, rupture set representative of the new Unified California Earthquake Rupture Forecast. (3) Implement a new dynamic-rupture based kinematic source model to compute ground motions up to 8 cycles per second. (4) Evaluate the basin connectivity phenomenon observed in previous simulations to establish the importance of waveguide modeling at low seismic frequencies. (5) Investigate and characterize the influence of material and source models on the accuracy of ground motion simulations. (6) Validate and calibrate the rheological models used in simulations. (7) Test the physics-based hazard capabilities on a vulnerable embankment dam. The goal of this research is to improve the physical representations of earthquake processes and the deterministic codes for simulating earthquakes, which will improve PSHA practice in the United States and benefit earthquake system science worldwide.

Blue Waters User Portal

Blue Waters Home Page

Blue Waters User Wiki Site

File System Organization

The three file systems are provided to the users as follows:

  • /u – storage for home directories
  • /projects – storage for project home directories
  • /scratch – high performance, high capacity transient storage for applications

Acknowledgement

Please include the following acknowledgement in any publications resulting from your work on the system.

This research is part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications. This work is also part of the "Extending the Spatiotemporal Scales of Physics-based Seismic Hazard Analysis" PRAC allocation support by the National Science Foundation (award number OCI-1440085).

SCEC at 2018 Blue Waters Symposium

Integrating Physics-based Earthquake Cycle Simulator Models and High-Resolution Ground Motion Simulations into a Physics-based Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Model

Authors: T. H. Jordan, J. Bielak, S. Callaghan, Y. Cui, A. R. Escandon, J. Gilchrist, C. A. Goulet, R. W. Graves, Z. Hu, A. Juarez, N. Khoshnevis, P. J. Maechling, D. Mu, K. R. Milner, K. B. Olsen, D. Pekurovsky, D. Restrepo, D. Roten, W. H. Savran, B. Shaw, R. Taborda, J. Vidale, Q. Yao

The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) is using Blue Waters to develop an empirically-calibrated physics-based earthquake forecast, and to characterize the influence of source models and non-linear material response to strong shaking on the accuracy of ground motion simulations. We summarize recent progress achieved through these simulations. During the last year, we used the physics-based earthquake cycle simulator code, called RSQSim, to produce several million-year earthquake catalogs to investigate how fault complexities affect the probabilities of large, multi-fault ruptures and multi-event sequences. We also performed systematic verification of the methods and procedures currently used in three-dimensional high-frequency (f ≤ 5 Hz) earthquake ground motion simulations, using alternative numerical methods and codes. This research is improving the physical representations of earthquake processes and the deterministic codes for simulating earthquakes, which will improve probabilistic seismic hazard analysis in the United States and benefit earthquake system science worldwide.

SCEC at 2017 Blue Waters Symposium

Christine Goulet attended and presented SCEC research at the 2017 Blue Waters symposium.

Previous SCEC PRAC Project Description (2015)

Extending the Spatiotemporal Scales of Physics-based Seismic Hazard Analysis

PI: T. H. Jordan (USC); Co-PIs: J. Bielak (CMU), K. Olsen (SDSU), Y. Cui (SDSC)

Earthquake simulations at the spatiotemporal scales required for probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) present some of the toughest computational challenges in geoscience. PSHA is the scientific basis for many engineering and social applications: performance-based design, seismic retrofitting, resilience engineering, insurance-rate setting, disaster preparation and warning, emergency response, and public education. This project will extend deterministic earthquake simulations to seismic frequencies of 2 Hz and greater with the goal of reducing the epistemic uncertainties in physics-based PSHA. The research will address fundamental scientific problems that limit the scale range in current representations of source physics, anelasticity, and geologic heterogeneity. The research will improve the physical representations of earthquake processes and the deterministic codes for simulating earthquakes, which will benefit earthquake system science worldwide. The consequent decrease in mean exceedance probabilities, which could be up to an order of magnitude at high hazard levels, would have a broad impact on the prioritization and economic costs of risk-reduction strategies.

Previous research on Blue Waters has verified the scalability and computational readiness of the simulation codes. These codes will be used to advance physics-based PSHA through a coordinated program of numerical experimentation and large-scale simulation targeted at three primary objectives: (1) validation of high-frequency simulations against seismic recordings of historical earthquakes; (2) computation of high-frequency CyberShake hazard models for the Los Angeles region to support the development of high-resolution urban seismic hazard maps by the U. S. Geological Survey and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), and (3) high-frequency simulation of a M7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault to revise the 2008 Great California ShakeOut scenario and improve the risk analysis developed in detail for that scenario. The plan to accomplish this research has five computational milestones: (a) dynamic rupture simulations up to 8 Hz that include fault roughness and near-fault plasticity; (b) simulations of historic earthquakes up to 4 Hz for model validation; (c) simulations of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake up to 8 Hz for verification and validation; (d) extension of the 2008 ShakeOut scenario to 4 Hz; and (e) calculation of a complete CyberShake hazard model for the Los Angeles region up to 2 Hz. Blue Waters is a Cray XE6/XK7 system consisting of more than 22,500 XE6 compute nodes (each containing two AMD Interlagos processors) augmented by more than 4200 XK7 compute nodes (each containing one AMD Interlagos processor and one NVIDIA GK110 "Kepler" accelerator) in a single Gemini interconnection fabric. This configuration enables extremely large simulations on hundreds of thousands of traditional CPUs for science and engineering discovery, while also supporting development and optimization of cutting-edge applications capable of leveraging the compute power of thousands of GPUs.

This research is part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications. This work is also part of the "Extending the Spatiotemporal Scales of Physics-based Seismic Hazard Analysis" PRAC (award OCI-1440085) allocation support by the National Science Foundation.


Philip Maechling attended the 2015 meeting for SCEC and presented a summary of work this year.

PRAC 2014 Award

Extending the Spatiotemporal Scales of Physics-based Seismic Hazard Analysis (OCI-1440085)

Thomas H. Jordan attended the 2014 Blue Waters Symposium and presented SCEC research summary for 2014.

SCEC At Blue Waters Symposium 2013

E. Poyraz attended the 2013 NEIS-P2 meeting and presented progress developing GPU codes for Blue Waters

PRAC 2009 Award

Petascale Research in Earthquake System Science on Blue Waters (OCI-0832698)

Related Links

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