SCEC ShakeOut Simulations: Dynamic Source Effects

Yifeng Cui, Kim B. Olsen, Jing Zhu, Steven M. Day, Philip J. Maechling, Luis A. Dalguer, Timothy H. Kaiser, Thomas H. Jordan, Amit Chourasia, & Reagan W. Moore

Accepted 2008, SCEC Contribution #1191

The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) performs a wide ranging program of simulation-based seismic hazard research with the goal of developing a predictive, physics-based, understanding of earthquake processes. SCEC is collaborating with the USGS and other emergency management agencies in a large-scale emergency management exercise scheduled for late 2008 called the Great Southern California ShakeOut (www.shakeout.org). To help estimate ground motions that might be produced by a large southern San Andreas earthquake, SCEC researchers ran a series of earthquake wave propagation simulations for a Mw7.8 ShakeOut scenario earthquake. Following on the approach and techniques developed on the TeraShake1 and TeraShake2 projects, the SCEC modeling group has run large-scale simulations of the ShakeOut earthquake using both empirically-derived kinematic source descriptions, and dynamic rupture-based source descriptions, using TeraGrid computer resources including TACC Ranger, LoneStar, and SDSC DataStar. The ShakeOut simulations were run at frequencies up to 1Hz, and in some cases, the simulations used very large (~1 TB) source representation files as inputs The ShakeOut simulation results indicate important differences between simulations that use empirically-derived kinematic rupture descriptions and simulations that use dynamic rupture-based source descriptions. In this paper, we describe new insights into the seismic hazards in California produced by the SCEC ShakeOut simulations and we report on our experience running high resolution ShakeOut simulations on TeraGrid resources.

Citation
Cui, Y., Olsen, K. B., Zhu, J., Day, S. M., Maechling, P. J., Dalguer, L. A., Kaiser, T. H., Jordan, T. H., Chourasia, A., & Moore, R. W. (2008). SCEC ShakeOut Simulations: Dynamic Source Effects. Oral Presentation at 2008 TeraGrid Conference.