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

该奖项促进了使用IBM开发的名为Blue Waters的大型新型计算资源的科学研究，该资源计划于2011年在伊利诺伊大学部署。它提供旅费以支持主要研究人员、Blue Waters项目团队和供应商技术团队之间的技术协调。该项目涉及移植到Blue Waters系统，并改进地震能量传播的两个代码，并将其用于约束优化问题，以根据地震数据确定地球的地质结构。该奖项将使项目团队能够评估这些代码在蓝水上的使用是否有可能在以下领域带来突破性的科学：地球的深层结构，包括地核-地幔边界的地形和内核的结构；更好地了解高地震风险地区的地质构造，并预测地面运动，这将使工程师能够探索基于性能的建筑结构设计；在矿产丰富的地区获得更准确的地质图像，以降低在复杂地质环境中钻井的风险和成本。该项目由两名新的研究人员领导，在为下一代大型并行计算机开发软件方面获得的见解将被纳入怀俄明大学新的计算科学教学中。如果该项目成功，它将为更好地描述美国怀俄明州等矿产丰富地区的矿产资源提供能力，并提高对地球深部的科学认识。

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.