Earthquake source and wave propagation modeling: development of methods and applications
Final Report Abstract
Reliable modeling of earthquake induced ground shaking require the understanding of seismic sources. This project successfully established a computational method for unified 3D numerical modeling of earthquake dynamics allowing integrated studies of the earthquake source and the propagation of seismic waves through realistic media. Our approach is to the study the combined effects of the source characteristics and structural properties, which are usually investigated separately. The developments of the modern numerical software package SeisSol (www.seissol.org) achieved in this project and in collaboration with national and international collaborators allowed us to simulate earthquakes on a scale equivalent to nature and in a multi-physics manner. Modeling earthquakes is a multiscale problem in both space and time, the challenge lies in the size scales that have to be taken into account. incorporating the observed complexity of earthquake sources invariably involves the use of numerical methods, highly efficient simulation software, and, of course, high-performance computing. Seismic simulations in realistic 3D Earth models require peta- or even exascale compute power to capture small-scale features of high relevance for scientific and industrial applications. Through several computational innovations led by Prof. Michael Bader’s group at TUM, the earthquake scenarios designed in the scope of this project, including the 1992 Landers, and 1994 Northridge, California, earthquakes and the 2004 Sumatra Indian Ocean earthquake, were performed in very high-resolution on some of the largest supercomputers world-wide. For example, the simulation of the 1992 Landers earthquake in California, presented at the Supercomputing Conference (SC14), demonstrated the mechanical viability earthquake jumping and branching from one segment of the fault to another. Furthermore, we shed light on important multi-physics aspects of earthquake source dynamics in terms of complexity of rock friction, complicated geometries and inelastic deformation across natural fault zones. ● Press release: Earthquake simulation tops one quadrillion flops: Computational record on SuperMUC. ● Inside Article, vol. 12 no. 4, 2014: “Optimizing a Seismic Wave Propagation Code for PetaScale-Simulations”. ● Press Release: The paper "Sustained Petascale Performance of Seismic Simulations with SeisSol on SuperMUC" received the PRACE ISC Award 2014 at the International Supercomputing Conference 2014, Leipzig. ● HPC Wire Article: “Earthquake Simulation Hits Petascale Milestone”. ● InsideHPC Article: SeisSol has been nominated as finalists of the Gordon Bell Prize 2014 at SC14. ● HPC Wire Article: “Earthquake Simulation Scales to 8.6 Petaflops”. ● LMU-TUM Research Team Wins Best Paper Award at SC17.
Publications
- “Source Properties of Dynamic Rupture Pulses with Off-Fault Plasticity”, J. Geophys. Res., 118(B8)
A.-A. Gabriel, J.-P. Ampuero, L. A. Dalguer and P. M. Mai
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jgrb.50213) - “Petascale High Order Dynamic Rupture Earthquake Simulations on Heterogeneous Supercomputers”, SC14 Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, 3–14
A. Heinecke, A. Breuer, S. Rettenberger, M. Bader, A.-A. Gabriel, C. Pelties, A. Bode, W. Barth, X.-K. Liao, K. Vaidyanathan, M. Smelyanskiy and P. Dubey
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SC.2014.6) - “Sustained Petascale Performance of Seismic Simulations with SeisSol on Super- MUC”, International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) Proceedings, 8488, 1–18
A. Breuer, A. Heinecke, S. Rettenberger, M. Bader, A.-A. Gabriel and C. Pelties
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07518-1_1) - “Verification of an ADER-DG method for complex dynamic rupture problems”, Geosci. Model Dev., 7, 847–866
C. Pelties, A.-A. Gabriel, and J.-P. Ampuero
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-7-847-2014) - (2015), “A Probable Earthquake Scenario near Istanbul Determined from Dynamic Simulations”, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America(2015),105(3):1468
Aochi, H. and T. Ulrich
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1785/0120140283) - (2016), ASAGI - A Parallel Server for Adaptive Geoinformation, in 2016 Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC2016) Proceedings
Rettenberger, S., O.Meister, M. Bader, and A.-A. Gabriel
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2938615.2938618)
