Bielak and Students Present Simulation Results at SCEC

Professor Jacobo Bielak and CEE graduate students Ricardo Taborda and Leonardo Ramirez recently presented their simulation results for the ShakeOut earthquake scenario in the annual meeting of the Southern California Earthquake Center  (see video).  The ShakOut scenario is part of a major effort of the U.S. Geological Survey's Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project (with the collaboration of SCEC) to support the decision-making of emergency planners and responders by examining the direct physical impact of a major earthquake in Sourthern California, as well as its social, cultural, environmental, and economic consequences.  The numerical results behind this animation were obtain using Hercules, an end-to-end octree-based parallel finite element code developed by the Quake Group  at Carnegie Mellon, under the leadership of Bielak and ECE/CS Prof. David O'Hallaron. The simulations were done at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).  Other team members of this research effort include Julio Lopez from CMU's Parallel Data Lab and John Urbanic from PSC.