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Title: Supercomputing meets seismology in earthquake exhibit

Abstract

When the California Academy of Sciences created the "Earthquake: Evidence of a Restless Planet" exhibit, they called on Lawrence Livermore to help combine seismic research with the latest data-driven visualization techniques. The outcome is a series of striking visualizations of earthquakes, tsunamis and tectonic plate evolution. Seismic-wave research is a core competency at Livermore. While most often associated with earthquakes, the research has many other applications of national interest, such as nuclear explosion monitoring, explosion forensics, energy exploration, and seismic acoustics. For the Academy effort, Livermore researchers simulated the San Andreas and Hayward fault events at high resolutions. Such calculations require significant computational resources. To simulate the 1906 earthquake, for instance, visualizing 125 seconds of ground motion required over 1 billion grid points, 10,000 time steps, and 7.5 hours of processor time on 2,048 cores of Livermore's Sierra machine.

Authors:
; ;
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE
OSTI Identifier:
1143637
Resource Type:
Multimedia
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; 58 GEOSCIENCES; EARTHQUAKE; SIMULATION; SEISMIC; SUPERCOMPUTER; COMPUTING; DATA VISUALIZATION; SEISMOLOGY

Citation Formats

Blackwell, Matt, Rodger, Arthur, and Kennedy, Tom. Supercomputing meets seismology in earthquake exhibit. United States: N. p., 2013. Web.
Blackwell, Matt, Rodger, Arthur, & Kennedy, Tom. Supercomputing meets seismology in earthquake exhibit. United States.
Blackwell, Matt, Rodger, Arthur, and Kennedy, Tom. Thu . "Supercomputing meets seismology in earthquake exhibit". United States. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1143637.
@article{osti_1143637,
title = {Supercomputing meets seismology in earthquake exhibit},
author = {Blackwell, Matt and Rodger, Arthur and Kennedy, Tom},
abstractNote = {When the California Academy of Sciences created the "Earthquake: Evidence of a Restless Planet" exhibit, they called on Lawrence Livermore to help combine seismic research with the latest data-driven visualization techniques. The outcome is a series of striking visualizations of earthquakes, tsunamis and tectonic plate evolution. Seismic-wave research is a core competency at Livermore. While most often associated with earthquakes, the research has many other applications of national interest, such as nuclear explosion monitoring, explosion forensics, energy exploration, and seismic acoustics. For the Academy effort, Livermore researchers simulated the San Andreas and Hayward fault events at high resolutions. Such calculations require significant computational resources. To simulate the 1906 earthquake, for instance, visualizing 125 seconds of ground motion required over 1 billion grid points, 10,000 time steps, and 7.5 hours of processor time on 2,048 cores of Livermore's Sierra machine.},
doi = {},
journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Thu Oct 03 00:00:00 EDT 2013},
month = {Thu Oct 03 00:00:00 EDT 2013}
}

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