Global Seismic Wave Propagation

Science Behind the Image

Modeling propagation of seismic waves through the Earth helps assess seismic hazard at regional scales and aids in interpretation of the Earth's inter structure at global scales. In this simulation of global wave propagation from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, the Earth is modeled using hexahedral elements that are adaptively sized based on the local length of seismic waves. A discontinuous Galerkin method is used for the numerical solution of the seismic wage propagation partial differential equations.

Visualization Behind the Image

The simulation was run on the TACC Lonestar IV system and produced ~3.4 terabytes of data for 330 time steps. The visualization was run on 32 nodes and 64 GPUs of the TACC Longhorn system.