UCERF3 JetStream Benchmark

Computing Proposal

The Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) provides a computational infrastructure to conduct numerical experiments that evaluate earthquake forecasts against authoritative data sources. Experiments can be either retrospective or prospective with each having different computational requirements. Prospective experiments involve calculations that trigger automatically from recent seismicity or on regular intervals (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly, etc). Retrospective experiments are initiated on-demand by scientists to evaluate earthquake forecasts over periods with recorded earthquake data. We are developing a software infrastructure that will support both type of experiments and provide thoughtful data access to the CSEP community. Additionally, we plan to explore the possibility of developing the CSEP infrastructure into a SaaS that gives researchers the ability to conduct bespoke experiments in a controlled and secure environment.

Our initial CSEP experiment will focus on the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast Version 3 (UCERF3-ETAS) [Field et al., 2017]. The standard unit-of-work for this UCERF3-ETAS experiment is a one-year stochastic event sets consisting of 10,000 synthetic catalogs. We have benchmarked the unit-of-work to use about 8000 SUs on JetStream and about 2.5 Gb of generated data. We will address our understanding of the added benefits that finite-faults provide in earthquake forecasts over hypocenter based models. In addition, we will evaluate how UCERF3-ETAS performs relative to more simple forecasts for all earthquakes with Mw > 6.2 that have occured since 1985. To accomplish these goals we estimate the runs will require about 25 units-of-work or 200,000 SUs. We require ten (m1.xxlarge) instances to perform these calculations with a shared mounted 100 Gb volume. We will also need 1 Tb of persistent storage to store metadata and archived experiment data. We would also like to request API access to OpenStack so we can automatically provision and free resources as necessary.

References

Field, Edward H., et al. "A spatiotemporal clustering model for the Third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF3‐ETAS): Toward an operational earthquake forecast." Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 107.3 (2017): 1049-1081.