Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Earthquake risk spurs race for faster supercomputer

BY: Joseph Stinton


Thomas Jordan is director of the Southern California Earthquake Center. Jordan is very concern by the state of the faults in Southern California. A way to give himself and the Southern California Earthquake Center some more reassurance about safety from earthquakes, they are now using supercomputers. These supercomputers run simulations on how an earthquake would affect southern California, so that the state can be more prepared when an earthquake does happen. This is in the forefront of their minds as the San Andres fault is “locked and load” according to Jordan.

They currently are using the Jaguar computer system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jordan’s team has been running simulations of how an earthquake might affect southern California. The computer is running at 1.75 petaflops; currently Jaguar is the world’s second-fastest supercomputer. Currently Jordan is preparing his application to work on Blue Waters, a 10-petaflop system that’s being built by IBM for use late next year at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

An application with a runtime of 4,000 hours (167 Days) per processor on Jaguar could be completed in just 770 hours (32 Days) on Blue Waters. There is an urgency to Jordan’s need for this computing power because many scholars believe that there’s a 99% chance of a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake during the next 30 years in California.

In class we learned that California is in a high hazard area for earthquakes because it lies on plates that are elastically rebounding. Which causes the earth’s tectonic plates to deform, causing elastic energy that builds up. Eventually this energy reaches a breaking point where it needs to be release, and released rapidly; this causes the earthquake to occur.

Earthquakes can be devastating as we saw recently in Haiti this year. Elastic energy built up and released rapidly on an area of populated land that was not made ready for earthquakes. This lead to mass death and Haitian infrastructure destroyed.

Jordan hopes that by using these computers he can determine how much destruction will occur, where it will occur, and best ways to prevent it from happening. The faster technology advances the faster and more simulations we will be able to perform that will prevent the most damage possible.

I found this article interesting because it combines modern technological advances with trying to prevent a natural phenomenon on earth that has been occurring since the formation of the planet. The fact that computers have the potential to advance so much that simulation after simulation, can be calculated, interpreted and even able to predict where an earthquake will occur, blows the mind.

Source:

Earthquake risk spurs race for faster supercomputer

By Patrick Thibodeau

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/352973/Scientists_Race_to_Simulate_Earthquakes

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