News

In the News

• Earthquake Codes Developed by SDSC, SDSU, SCEC Used in 2017 Gordon Bell Prize Research - Chinese team awarded this year’s prestigious Gordon Bell prize for simulating the devastating 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, China. SDSC, December 4, 2017. See also InsideHPC, Newswise

• Novel Seismic Software Sheds Light on Earthquake Paths - Earthquakes threaten lives and property all around the globe. Southern California, for example, is a very active region with a high probability of seismic hazards. To better understand the probabilities and paths of earthquakes, scientists experiment in virtual laboratories. R&D, June 6, 2017. See also ACM TechNews, WSSPC News

• SDSC Achieves Record Performance in Seismic Simulations With Intel - A new seismic modeling software system called EDGE, for Extreme-Scale Discontinuous Galerkin Environment, achieves ground-breaking performance of 10.4 Pflop/s, surpassed the previous seismic record of 8.6 PFLOPS conducted on China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer. HPCWire, March 7, 2017. See also NERSC News, Phys.Org News, InsideHPC, UCSD News, SDSC Facebook, diane bryant on Twitter

• Yifeng Cui Named SDSC PI Person of the Year. SDSC, June, 2016. See also SCEC Twitter.

• SDSC and Intel open second Intel Parallel Computing Center at SDSC - Intel has opened a second parallel computing center at SDSC with a focus on earthquake research. SDSC, February 9, 2016.

• Fault Finding: SoCal Researchers Use GPUs to Detect Earthquake Hazards Coming Our Way - SCEC recently completed CyberShake 15.4 calculation for 336 separate locations in the Los Angeles region involving a large ensemble of earthquakes, and doubled the maximum simulated frequency from 0.5 Hertz to 1 Hertz, therefore also doubled accuracy. As that measurement increases, so does the potential for damage-and the complexity of the simulation. Structures such as buildings and bridges are most vulnerable to damage by seismic waves between 1 and 10 hertz. NVIDIA Blog, Aug 31, 2015.

• Los Angeles basin jiggles like big bowl of jelly in cutting-edge simulations - SCEC used the NSF-funded Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA and the Department of Energy-funded Titan supercomputers at OLCF to carry out a simulation that doubled the maximum simulated frequency of the previous year’s model, therefore also doubling the accuracy. NSF News, Aug 20, 2015. See also in Future Directions for NSF ACI 2017-2020.

• SDSC Researchers Awarded NVIDIA 2015 Global Impact Award - NVIDIA's Global Impact Award is an annual award of $150,000 to researchers who use NVIDIA technology, such as Titan's GPUs, for groundbreaking work that addresses social, humanitarian, and environmental problems. NVIDIA presented Cui and his team at SDSC with the award at the GPU Technology Conference March 17-20 in San Jose, HPCWire, April 9, 2015.

• Research Shows a Way Forward in Making Earthquake Scenarios More Accurate - SDSC computational scientist Dr. Roten performed ShakeOut simulations with San Andreas fault zone plasticity on Kraken at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS). His study suggest that the nonlinear behavior in rocks could reduce the previous simulation-based estimates of expected ground motion velocity in the Los Angeles basin during a magnitude-7.8 event on the southern San Andreas Fault by 30 to 70 percent. NICS News, May 13, 2014.

• Titan Simulates Earthquake Physics Necessary for Safer Bulding Design - On OLCF Titan, the SCEC team was able to run simulations of a 7.2-magnitude earthquake up to 10 hertz, which can beter inform performance-based building design. The entire simulation totaled 443 billion grid points. OLCF News, Dec 16, 2013.

• HPGeoC Featured on CUDA Spotlight - Dr. Yifeng Cui of HPGeoC was interviewed by NVIDIA for the recent GPU-Accelerated Earthquake Simulations as part of the CUDA Action Spotlight Series, NVIDIA News, July 3, 2013, see also on the Parallel Forall blog, or in the CUDA Newsletter, was tweeted and posted on LinkedIn. Nvidia News, July 3, 2013

• SDSC GeoComputing Lab Named Winner of HPC Innovation Excellence Award by IDC - HPGeoC was named a winner of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award by the International Data Corporation (IDC) for developing a highly-scalable computer code that promises to dramatically cut both research times and energy costs in simulating seismic hazards throughout California and elsewhere. UCSD News, June 24, 2014. Appeared also in HPCWire, and IDC Announcement at ISC'13.

• Researchers Develop Code that Reduces Time and Cost in Simulating Seismic Hazards - The benchmarks, run on Titan, showed a five-fold speedup over the heavily optimized CPU code on the same system, and a sustained performance of one petaflop per second on the tested system, SDSC News, April 2, 2013. Also appeared in HPCWire, UCSD News, ScienceDaily and NVIDIA News.

• NSF FESD Simulating Earthquake Faults Project Annual Meeting held at SDSC, January 31 - February 1, 2013.

• SDSC, SDSU Share in $4.6 Million NSF Grant to Simulate Earthquake Faults - The five-year earthquake simulation project is to develop and apply the most capable earthquake simulators to investigate these fault systems, focusing first on the North American plate boundary and the San Andreas system of Northern and Southern California. UCSD News, September 23, 2011

• SDSC Visualizations Win 'OASCR' Awards at SciDAC 2011 - M8 visualization is among the recipients of the people's choice OASCR awards announced at the 2011 SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program) conference. Wired Science, August 8, 2011

• M8 Visualization Wins Best Visualization Display Award at TeraGrid'11 meeting - TeraGrid News, July 24, 2011

• 3-D Simulation Predicts LA Will Bear Brunt Of The "Big One" - new M8 movie released during SCEC annual meeting. Discovery News, September 2010.

• TeraGrid Helps Make Possible Largest-Ever Earthquake Simulation - The scientific results of this massive simulation have allowed us to observe things that we were not able to see in the past. TeraGrid News, September 2010.

• Supercomputing Enables Largest-Ever Earthquake Simulation - for a Magnitude 8.0 (M8) rupture of the entire southern San Andreas fault. Dr. Dobb's The World of Software Development, August 2010. See also The Orange County Register, UCSD News.

• SDSC Leads Supercomputing Efforts in Creating Largest-Ever Earthquake Simulation - Magnitude 8.0 Simulation, Named a Gordon Bell Prize Finalist, Could Guide Emergency Planning. SDSC News, August 19.

• Earthquake Simulation Rocks Southern California - Jaguar raises the bar for modeling the next big shakeup, HPC Wire, August 16, 2010. Also in ORNL News.

• Preparing for the big one - NCSA works with group led by SCEC to run large earthquake simulations on Blue Waters and characterize seismic hazard risk. NCSA News, April 21, 2010

• DOE INCITE Award 2010 - Department of Energy awarded scientists from SDSC 27 million core hours to the project titled "Deterministic Simulations of Large Regional Earthquakes at Frequencies up to 2 Hz". UCSD News, February 2, 2010. See also HPC Wire.

• Shift in Simulation Superiority - SDSC Research Highlighted at NSF News, including also Cumulative Peak Ground Velocities and Earthquake Velocity Magnitude at Different Intervals, NSF News, 2009

• Wired Magazine, Top Science Breakthrough 2009, December 31, 2009

• Vizworld, SciDAC OASCR Winner, August 19, 2009

• HPC Wire, Kraken Super Passes Formal Acceptance, March 23, 2009

• China News, Pacific M9 Earthquake Simulation, March 11, 2009

• HPC Wire, DOE Awards Supercomputing Time to UCSD, SDSC, January 13, 2009

• International Science Grid This Week, Anticipating "The big one", February 4, 2009

• UCSD News, Supercomputer Unleashes Virtual 9.0 Megaquake

• The China Press, Supercomputer Enabled Large-scale Earthquake Animation, August 2, 2007

• Featured, AT&T Tech Channel, August, 2007

• International Science Grid This Week, Feature - Making the Earth Move, February, 2007

• SDSC News, SDSC Enables PetaShake Simulation on 40,960 Processor IBM Blue Gene Watson System, November 6, 2006

• NCSA News, A Fair Shake for Seismologists, November 7, 2006

• SDSC News, SDSC Helps National Geographic Explore the "Big One", September 6, 2006

• National Geographic Channel, LA's Future Quake , September 2006

• History Channel, LA's Killer Quake, September 2006

• The Los Angeles Times, Computer Pictures 'the Big One', May 27, 2006

• HPC Wire, HPC Simulation Predicts Effect of Massive Earthquake, May 19, 2006

• International Science Grid This Week, Image of the Week: TeraShake-2 Simulation, February 2006

• HPC Wire, SDSC Hosts IEEE Visualization Design Contest , February 2006

• HPC Wire, Simulating Earthquakes for Science and Society, January 27, 2006

• SDSC News, Terashake 2: Simulating Earthquakes for Science and Society, January 23, 2006

• TeraShake highligted in the 2005 PITAC annual report: Computational Science: Ensuiring America's Competitiveness, President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, June 2005

• American Institute of Physics, TeraShake: Geophysics, Seismologists Work to Predict Where Future Earthquakes Will Produce Most Damage, March 1, 2005

• HPC Wire, TeraShake: SDSC Simulates the 'Big One''', December 17, 2004

• SDSC Thread, Scientific Computing Corner: SDSC Strategic Applications Collaborations Program Helps SCEC Conduct Terascale Earthquake Simulations , November 2004