Petascale Research in Earthquake System Science on Blue Waters (PressOn)

Broader Impacts. The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) conducts a broad program of earthquake system science that seeks to develop a predictive understanding of earthquake processes with a practical mission aimed at providing society with improved understanding of seismic hazards. In partnership with earthquake engineers, SCEC researchers are developing the ability to conduct end-to-end simulations (" rupture to rafters ") to extend this improved understanding of seismic hazard to an improved understanding of earthquake risks. In order to perform this comprehensive earthquake system science and engineering research program, SCEC researchers use several numerical modeling application codes that are capable of simulating a wide spectrum of earthquake and engineering processes including dynamic simulations of fault ruptures, seismic wave propagation simulation, probabilistic seismic hazard calculations, and structural response to high frequency ground motions. These high performance application codes are proving to be essential research tools, but they cannot yet achieve the physical scale and resolution needed to realistically model earthquake processes and their impact on a built environment. In order to reach our goal of performing physically realistic earthquake and engineering simulations , and completing these simulations within a reasonable time, our numerical modeling codes must be capable of sustained PetaFLOPS performance. Intellectual Merit. In this project, we propose to analyze and optimize the performance of three seismic and engineering numerical modeling application codes for use on the upcoming NSF petascale computer Blue Waters. The application codes that we will prepare for use on Blue Waters will allow us to (1) improve the resolution of dynamic rupture simulations by an order of magnitude to investigate realistic friction laws, near-fault stress states, and off-fault plasticity; (2) investigate the upper frequency limit of de-terministic ground-motion prediction by simulating strong motions up to 3 Hz using realistic 3D structural models for Southern California; and (3) model building response to broadband ground motions for improved understanding of engineering response to ground motions. The integrated, end-to-end, capabilities of these research applications running on petascale computing resources represent an unprecedented opportunity for advances in our understanding and characterization of seismic hazard and risk. Project Plan. We propose to achieve the objectives of the Petascale Research in Earthquake System Science on Blue Waters (PressOn) Project by preparing three advanced, highly parallel, numerical mod-eling codes to run on Blue Waters. The codes we will prepare for use on Blue Waters are under active development and optimization through two complementary and …