Geoinformatics: A Petascale Cyberfacility for Physics-Based Seismic Hazard Analysis (SCEC PetaSHA3 Project)

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The SCEC PetaSHA3 project will develop computational models of system-level earthquake processes and, running these models on NSF supercomputers, derive more accurate estimates of the strong ground motion expected from future earthquakes in California. SCEC?s CyberShake computational platform recently produced the first physics-based probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) for the Los Angeles region?a major scientific innovation of the PetaSHA2 project and a breakthrough in workflow-managed, high-capacity computing (50-day continuous run on 4000 processors of the TACC Ranger supercomputer). SCEC will implement CyberShake on the largest NSF supercomputers, including Blue Waters, with the goal of calculating high-resolution, high-frequency PSHA maps for the entire State of California in the next two years. This will require validation against very large data sets and a hundredfold increase in computational efficiency.The project will use the CyberShake platform to represent time-dependent seismic hazard for operational earthquake forecasting (OEF). The goal of OEF is to provide authoritative information about the time dependence of seismic hazards to help communities prepare for potentially destructive earthquakes. The first OEF model for California (UCERF3) is now being developed by SCEC, USGS and CGS under a contract with the California Earthquake Authority. By coupling UCERF3 into the CyberShake system, the project will produce PSHA maps that show how seismic hazards are changing on a daily basis?i.e., it will extend CyberShake from the mapping of long-term hazard (seismic climate) to short-term hazard (seismic weather)?an entirely new capability not possible using conventional PSHA techniques. If successful, these developments are expected to have substantial impacts on seismic engineering, insurance rate-setting and reinsurance strategies, and earthquake preparedness activities, as well as basic research on earthquake predictability.