Collaboration between governmental and academic institutions is key to mitigating regional and national hazards, a reality the University’s earthquake lab understands and implements.
The Center for Civil Engineering Earthquake Research (CCEER), home of the Laminar Soil Box System unveiled in September, is partnering with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to better understand earthquake response of infrastructure at regional-scale. The conduit to this collaborative project — which depends on sharing massive amounts of data quickly — is the U.S. Department of Energy’s high-performance Energy Systems Network, or “ESnet,” developed and managed by Berkeley Lab and funded by the DOE.
Graphic shows the execution of massively parallel ground motion simulation at Oak Ridge and use of ESnet to send data to Berkeley Lab. CCEER then uses the data for its infrastructure earthquake risk assessments.“It allows us to run regional-scale earthquake simulations on the new DOE super-computers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, move tens to hundreds of Terabytes of output data back to Lawrence Berkeley Lab, where we can have that data set of ground motions as a resource to use in our infrastructure earthquake risk assessments,” David McCallen, CCEER director, said.
McCallen presented an ESnet use-case example on massively parallel regional earthquake simulations at a recent event at Berkeley Lab to debut ESnet6, the latest version of the network. ESnet6 can exchange data sets across the country at 100-400 gigabytes per second.
As seen in the graphic, massive earthquake data from the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Leadership Computing Center transfers to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Berkeley Lab. Simulated earthquake ground motions for 3.14 billion surface sites in the San Francisco Bay Area are divided into 2 gigabyte packets and sent across the parallel optical fiber network to Berkeley Lab. The time required to send the motions for all 3.14 billion sites is about 10 minutes.
ESnet is helping to facilitate the EarthQuake SIMulation framework, or EQSIM, a collaborative effort between the University’s earthquake lab — which houses the custom-built, one-of-a-kind Soil Box experimental facility that tests soil-structure interaction — and the two national labs, which have the supercomputers necessary to develop the large, detailed earthquake simulations. Ultimately, these simulated ground motions will be made available to the public through the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center’s open-access database of ground motions at the University of California Berkeley.
This work aligns with one of the College of Engineering’s main focus areas: engineering and design equitable community infrastructure to mitigate cascading local, regional and global hazards.
