Accelerated Code Cuts Time and Cost in Seismic Modeling.

A team of researchers at SDSC and the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, developed a highly-scalable computer code that promises to dramatically cut both research times and energy costs in simulating seismic hazards throughout California and elsewhere. The team, led by Yifeng Cui, a computational scientist at SDSC, developed the scalable GPU (graphical processing units) accelerated code for use in earthquake engineering and disaster management through regional earthquake simulations at the petascale level as part of a larger computational effort coordinated by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC). San Diego State University (SDSU) is also part of this collaborative effort in pushing the envelope toward extreme-scale earthquake computing.