Description

Recent advances in geophysics have made it possible for the first time to create fully three-dimensional simulations of fault-rupture and fault-system dynamics. Such physics-based simulations are crucial to gaining a fundamental understanding of earthquake phenomena, and they can potentially provide enormous practical benefits for assessing and mitigating earthquake risks through improvements in seismic hazard analysis. This project represents a collaboration among the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the Incorporated Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

To achieve its objectives, the environment must provide a means for describing, configuring, instantiating, and executing complex computational pathways that result from the composition of various earthquake simulation models. This entails solving a number of challenging problems in information technology. Many object types must be manipulated, and a number of algorithms must be employed. Algorithm inputs and outputs can be very complex and take different meanings for users in different disciplines. Models are developed in distributed collaborations, and any model component may require access to remote databases and data sets, as well as require remote high-performance computing resources for its execution. To solve these problems, we will bring together research from several distinct computer science disciplines:

• Knowledge representation and reasoning techniques to manage the heterogeneity of the models and capture the complex relationships between the physical processes and the model algorithms, between the algorithms and the simulation codes, and between the simulation codes and the data products. Knowledge-based inference will be used to apply these representations to the problems of pathway construction, constraint checking, execution planning, and information access.
• Grid technologies to enable access to distributed simulation codes and resources for the timely execution of the simulation scenarios defined by users, specifically by integrating high-performance computing resources into the execution environment available to the modeling framework. By providing mechanisms for the discovery, access, and management of distributed computation and storage resources, Grids address the distributed nature of the developers, resources and user environments.
• Digital library technology to manage the collections of data and simulation code repositories and handle multiple versions of the models. Knowledge-based data management tools will provide an infrastructure for mediating access to existing seismic data catalogs and information repositories, as well as incorporating new collections of data generated by the simulations.
• Interactive knowledge acquisition techniques to enable users with a range of sophistication to configure computational pathways. Knowledge acquisition tools support this activity by selecting appropriate simulation software and input data files from the available code and information repositories. These tools hide implementation details and present users with structured dialogues that guide them to provide information required to set up each simulation while resolving the constraints among the simulation models and their inputs.

The proposed research will be conducted by a collaboration between leading researchers in each of these information technology areas and earthquake scientists.

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