TeraGrid 2007 Science Highlights Welcome
e are pleased to present this 2007 collection TeraGrid has made tremendous strides in working with Wof highlights in research and education accomplished with more than 20 Science Gateways to make TeraGrid the TeraGrid. These accomplishments could not have been resources available through community portals and appli- achieved without the combined efforts of the principal cations that are used by thousands of scientists. The investigators and their research teams working with the Science Gateways have enabled communities of TeraGrid team, through the support provided by the researchers, many of whom have never before used high- National Science Foundation's Office of performance computing resources, by seamlessly inte- Cyberinfrastructure. grating TeraGrid resources within familiar computing envi- ronments used by these researchers. The impact of these TeraGrid is a national cyberinfrastructure facility that inte- Science Gateways is described in more detail in the grates high-performance resources and services to Special Section of this publication. empower researchers and educators to advance scientific discovery. TeraGrid partners work together to provide sci- In addition to providing national-scale integrated high-per- entific computational services that assist researchers in formance computing resources, TeraGrid has become a harnessing the more than 250 teraflops of combined com- social network of scientists, technologists, and educators putational capacity, more than 30 petabytes of online and working together to enable new scientific discoveries. The archival data storage, more than 100 scientific data collec- growth of this network is predicated on a strong founda- tions, visualization software and servers, all interconnect- tion of communication, and we encourage you to share ed with a dedicated high-speed optical network between with us your ideas and successes as we build for the Resource Provider sites. Over 500 teraflops of computa- future. tional capacity will be added to TeraGrid in January 2008 when the first of several planned new National Science I hope you enjoy the following examples of the exciting Foundation investments come into production, expanding breakthroughs being made and that you'll join with us in the number of Resource Providers to 11 sites across the the enterprise of scientific discovery. Welcome! country. Further additions will accelerate TeraGrid into petascale computing through 2010. Dane Skow, The mission of the TeraGrid team is to provide integrated, Director, TeraGrid Grid Infrastructure Group persistent, and pioneering computational resources and services that will significantly improve our nation's ability and capacity to gain new insights into our most challeng- ing research questions and societal problems. TeraGrid's Advanced Support for TeraGrid Applications (ASTA) pro- gram couples application experts from TeraGrid Resource Provider sites together with select scientific teams to develop optimal solutions to science applications using TeraGrid services and resources. 18 Earthquake research teams use TeraGrid resources to realistically simulate soil vibration during major quakes. When the earth shakes TeraGrid Science Highlights Science TeraGrid
PSC staff are developing user-friendly visualization tools to compare results from Hercules with TeraShake, earthquake simulation software developed at SCEC. To show how and why the two programs differ is important for validation of their results. This graphic shows the displacment from soil vibration in a Hercules run (above) compared to the same region from a TeraShake run (below). Image courtesy of PSC. 19
More information: When the earth shakes
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/
Jacobo Bielak and David O'Hallaron, Carnegie Mellon University. Photo by Annie O'Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
basic goal of earthquake research is to know Ahow the Earth will shake. “Even from one city block to the next, the level of shaking can change dramatically due to subsurface soil and the nature of the seismic waves,” says
Jacobo Bielak, professor of civil and environmental engineer- TeraGrid 2007 ing at Carnegie Mellon University.
Bielak and his colleague David O'Hallaron lead the Quake Project, a large collaborative research team that uses sophisticated computational methods to create realistic 3D models of earthquakes. In collaboration with the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), their work aims to provide information that will result in seismic provisions in building codes that will ensure the safest possible structures at reasonable cost. A new city for Istanbul
SCEC and the Quake Project rely heavily on TeraGrid Istanbul, populated by 12 million people in resources. In November 2006, the Quake team won the Analytics Challenge Award at SC06 in Tampa for “Hercules”— brittle concrete and masonry housing, has been software that coordinates all the stages of very large-scale devastated by earthquakes many times in its earthquake simulation, from problem definition to final visu- history, and the next catastrophe is only a matter alization. With this unified framework, all tasks—building a software mesh that subdivides the subsurface region, parti- of time. As part of advance planning for this tioning the job among hundreds or thousands of processors, dreaded event, the Istanbul city government the simulation itself, and visualizing results—are performed commissioned a team at Purdue University in place on the processors of a supercomputer. Relying on led by Nicoletta Adamo-Villani and Mete Sozen innovative software developed at PSC, Hercules can visualize results in real time as a simulation is running. to design and visualize a satellite city. Their plan includes a business district, research and In December 2006, the Quake team used Hercules with government centers, retail and cultural facilities, 2,048 processors of PSC's Cray XT3 for an unprecedented computation, simulating a magnitude 7.7 quake along the with all construction earthquake resistant. After San Andreas fault at high-frequency vibration (one cycle per the team created the city plan in AutoCAD and second) and realistic soil properties. Higher frequencies modeled the city in Maya, a major challenge was greatly increase the size of the computation but are important because they help represent the structures that present the to render the final sequence by their deadline. greatest danger. This Hercules simulation showed specifics To accomplish this, they relied on TeraGrid on how ground motion selects a propagation path and affects software called TeraDRE (Distributed Rendering some areas more than others. Environment on the TeraGrid) and a TeraGrid cluster of 4,000 PCs spread across the Purdue campus.