Super computer Gordon to assist researchers identify seismic faultlines

Researchers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University (SDSU) will be assisting researchers from six other universities and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to develop detailed, large-scale computer simulations of earthquake faults under a new $4.6-million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant announced this week.

A perspective view of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) California Community Fault Model. Earthquake hypocenters are color coded by date. This model, with alternate representations of fine-scale details, will be implemented for the UCR project simulations. (Credit: Southern California Earthquake Center)

The computer simulations will use Gordon, San Diego Supercomputer Centre's innovative new supercomputer to officially enter production in January.

The result of a five-year, $20 million NSF award, Gordon is the first high-performance supercomputer to use large amounts of flash-based SSD (solid state drive) memory. Flash memory is more common in smaller devices such as mobile phones and laptop computers, but unique for supercomputers, which generally use slower spinning-disk technology.

Capable of  performing in excess of 200 teraflops (TF) with a total of 64 terabytes TB (terabytes) of memory and 300TB of high performance solid state drives served via 64 I/O nodes, Gordon is designed for data-intensive applications spanning domains such as genomics, graph problems, and data mining, in addition to geophysics. Gordon will be capable of handling massive databases while providing up to 100 times faster speeds when compared to hard drive disk systems for some queries.

San Diego Supercomputer Center recently took delivery of Gordon's flash-based I/O nodes and is providing access to early users for benchmarking and testing.

The five-year earthquake simulation project is being led by the University of California, Riverside (UCR), and also includes researchers from the University of Southern California (USC), Brown University, and Columbia University. Scientists will develop and apply the most capable earthquake simulators to investigate these fault systems, focusing first on the North American plate boundary and the San Andreas system of Northern and Southern California.