Outward on the Spiral: Petascale Inference in Earthquake System Science (SCEC PetaShake Project)

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5.The goal of this project is to take physics-based seismic hazard analysis (SHA) to a new level using petascale computational resources. Building on the scientific and technical successes under their current PetaApps award the PIs will incorporate better theory and data into their earthquake simulations through their continued development of Earthquake system science.Earthquake system science presents some of the most challenging computational pathways in geoscience. Taken from end to end, the earthquake problem comprises the loading and failure of tectonic faults, the generation and propagation of seismic waves, the response of surface sites, and ? in its application to seismic risk ? the damage caused by earthquakes to the built environment. These pathways involve a wide variety of interactions, some highly nonlinear and multiscale.The Community Modeling Environment (CME) of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) is a large collaboratory for investigating earthquake systems using NSF?s TeraGrid facilities for high performance computing (HPC). Through a series of grants, NSF/EAR and NSF/OCI have funded the CME Collaboration to develop an integrated cyber facility ? PetaSHA ? for executing physics-based SHA computations and managing the resulting data volumes using the NSF?s most capable computing centers. In this project, the PIs will continue CME development of the PetaShake platform (a new petascale capability-computing platform). In addition to pushing their simulations toward petascale, the PIs will equip the PetaShake platform with a new set of simulation-analysis tools that will be needed in applying petascale resources to make scientifically validated inferences about earthquakes.