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Los Angeles basin jiggles like big bowl of jelly in cutting-edge simulations

chart comparing SCEC simulations to observations from the 2008 Chino Hills earthquake.

These two Los Angeles area maps compare ground motions calculated by SCEC earthquake simulations to ground motions observed during the 2008 Chino Hills earthquake. On each map, the star marks the quake's epicenter, and the dots show locations where ground motions were recorded for that earthquake. The color variations show how well the simulated ground motions match the observed ground motions, with darker colors (from red to black) indicating areas with poorer matches and lighter colors (from yellow to white) indicating areas with good matches. The two maps show results from simulations using different 3-D Earth structure models. The Earth model that produced the best overall match to observations (shown here on the left) was the model used as input for the team's recent 1 hertz CyberShake seismic hazard simulation on the Blue Waters supercomputer.

Credit: Ricardo Taborda, University of Memphis, and Jacobo Bielak, Carnegie Mellon University


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map for 336 sites in the Los Angeles region show regions of high and low hazard risk

CyberShake study 15.4 hazard map for 336 sites (white triangles) in the Los Angeles region. Map displays response spectral acceleration at 2-second periods in units of surface gravitational acceleration for a 2 percent probability of exceedance in 50 years. Warm colors, representing areas of high hazard, often correspond to regions that overlay sedimentary basins including areas near Ventura (left center), Los Angeles (center) and San Bernardino (right center).

Credit: Scott Callaghan, Kevin Milner and Thomas H. Jordan, Southern California Earthquake Center


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rows of machines making up a supercomputer

Blue Waters has been configured to solve the most challenging compute-, memory- and data-intensive problems in science and engineering. It has tens of thousands of chips (central processing units [CPUs] and graphics processing units [GPUs]), more than a petabyte of memory, tens of petabytes of disk storage, and hundreds of petabytes of archival storage.

Credit: NCSA/University of Illinois


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supercomputer with the word titan on it

Titan is a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan is an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses GPUs in addition to conventional CPUs.

Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory and NVIDIA Corporation.


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