Currently, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from

the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Berkeley (Berkeley Lab) and Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) national laboratories, as well as the University of California at Davis are building the first-ever end-to-end  code to precisely capture the geology and physics of regional earthquakes, and how the shaking impacts buildings. This work is part of the DOE's Exascale Computing Project (ECP), which aims to maximize the benefits of exascale—future supercomputers that will be 50 times faster than our nation's most powerful system today—for U.S. economic competitiveness, national security and scientific discovery.
"Due to computing limitations, current geophysics simulations at the regional level typically resolve ground motions at 1-2 hertz (vibrations per second). Ultimately, we'd like to have motion estimates on the order of 5-10 hertz to accurately capture the dynamic response for a wide range of infrastructure," says David McCallen, who leads an ECP-supported effort called High Performance, Multidisciplinary Simulations for Regional Scale Seismic Hazard and Risk Assessments. He's also a guest scientist in Berkeley Lab's Earth and Environmental Sciences Area.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-regional-earthquake-hazards-age-exascale.html#jCp