ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid: Towards Petascale Simulation of Urban Earthquake Impacts

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Note: The project described in this document is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) to use TeraGrid's petascale environments for highly advanced scientific analysis and simulations that advance the frontiers of scientific and engineering research. For more, see ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid.

This project is developing methodologies, capability, and software for high-fidelity, physics-based petascale simulations of an entire high seismicity urban region (the Greater Los Angeles Basin) to assess the engineering impacts of large magnitude earthquakes on buildings, transportation system components, and the underground civil infrastructure.

Simulating the effects of earthquakes on a densely built environment is a unique science driver for petascale computing systems because it involves multiple length scales with different physics, as well as large data volumes; it also requires highly scalable parallel visualization and data querying. Current three-dimensional earthquake simulations have been limited to linear soil behavior and isolated, individual structures. Advancing beyond current approaches, this project will develop simulation capability that includes:

The interaction between the soil, foundations, and large inventories of buildings, bridges, and other infrastructure systems
The interaction between structures in densely built areas
The effect of the structures on the free-field motion
Nonlinear soil behavior and the effect of the pore water pressure in saturated soils leading to liquefaction

The methodology, applications, and the results of the simulations will be useful for disaster planning and management.

For more, see award abstract #0749227 on the NSF web site.