Collaborative Research: SGER--Profiling and Analysis of Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) HPC Code for Petascale Simulations

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This project is an exploratory activity intended to test the application of new expertise and techniques in performance modeling and optimization to the numerical simulation of earthquakes. It encompasses preliminary work to determine the feasibility of a future effort to develop a petascale version of the Anelastic Wave Modeling (AWM) code that forms part of the Southern California Earthquake Center's community modeling environment. If the AWM and similar models can be adapted to run well on large-scale computational resources, such as forthcoming petascale systems, then it will be possible for researchers to use the model to study the ground motion that would accompany "worst-case" scenarios of earthquakes in Southern California, and elsewhere, resolving frequencies that are important in estimating the damage to built structures. The project is one of a series of pilot projects spawned by a workshop on "Petascale Computing and the Geosciences" in Spring 2006. The purpose of these pilot activities, all related to the use of high-performance computational modeling in different parts of the geosciences, is to determine how the simulation tools used in leading-edge geoscience research can be adapted for the very large-scale computing systems that will be deployed in the next few years. The results of these analyses will be discussed at a second workshop on "Petascale Computing and the Geosciences" in Fall 2006. This SGER project involves collaboration between computer scientists from University of California-San Diego (UCSD), who specialize in the detailed analysis and optimization of numerical applications, and geoscientists from University of Southern California (USC) and San Diego State University (SDSU) who are part of the Southern California Earthquake Center.Broader impacts of this work stem from the potential of earthquake modeling on petascale computers to be able to predict the geographic distribution of seismic hazards more accurately than is presently possible.