The Workflow of Large Scale Ground Motion Simulations: Preprocessing, forward simulations, postprocessing

Christopher Tobar, & Alexander N. Breuer

Published August 16, 2021, SCEC Contribution #11546, 2021 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #026

When it comes to large scale ground motion simulation of earthquakes, there is a scientific gap in pipelining of a three step process: pre-processing, simulation, and post-processing. By pipelining this process, we are able to improve efficiency and productivity of simulation of these earthquakes. In working on streamlining this process, we can make simulation of earthquakes more accessible to the public, and help with mitigating the risk and impacts of potential earthquakes. All the steps were done through a cloud computing machine, and the use of a unix system like Linux. The first step towards pre-processing is downloading edge from github, created by Alexander Bruer. This program has many dependencies needed like gmsh, edge_v, scons, and zlib that will be used throughout. Once this has been downloaded, we begin automation of the creation of files and running of code through the use of bash scripts, which ran gmsh and edge_v. After files are created and code is ran, we can move onto simulation, where the earthquakes are simulated with the files created. Simulation is also done through bash scripts, which runs the solver and different sizes of characteristic lengths. Once simulation is done, we move onto post processing, which is the manipulation of the data received from running the solver. During post processing, we graph the information using pandas and matplotlib in python. By working on streamlining this process, we are able to automate the process, generate a mesh, run a simulation on it, and visualize that data. By doing this, we are able to make the simulation of earthquakes more effective and proficient, and further help simulate future earthquakes in various locations to help mitigate possible damage and casualties.

Citation
Tobar, C., & Breuer, A. N. (2021, 08). The Workflow of Large Scale Ground Motion Simulations: Preprocessing, forward simulations, postprocessing. Poster Presentation at 2021 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Computational Science (CS)