Enabling Large-Scale, High-Resolution, and Real-Time Earthquake Simulations on Petascale Parallel Computers

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This award facilitates scientific research using the large, new, computational resource named Blue Waters being developed by IBM and scheduled to be deployed at the University of Illinois in 2011. It provides travel funds to support technical coordination between the principal investigators, the Blue Waters project team and the vendor technical team.The project involves porting to the Blue Waters system and refining two codes for the propagation of seismic energy and their use in constrained optimization problems to determine the geological structure of the Earth from seismic data. The award will enable the project team to evaluate whether the use of these codes on Blue Waters is likely to lead to breakthrough science in the following areas: the deep structure of the Earth, including the topography of the core-mantle boundary and the structure of the inner Core; a better understanding of the geological formations in regions with high seismic risks, and predictions of ground motion that will allow engineers to explore performance-based design of built structures; and more accurate pictures of geology in mineral-rich areas to reduce the risk and cost associated with drilling in complex geological environments.The project is led by two new investigators and the insights gained into developing software for the next generation of large, parallel computers will be incorporated into new computational science teaching at the University of Wyoming. If the project is successful, it will provide a capability for better characterizing mineral resources in mineral-rich areas of the U.S. such as Wyoming as well as improving scientific understanding of the deep Earth.