Riding that wave: Earthquake Visualization

One of the winners at this summer’s SciDAC Visualization Night was an impressive visualization of a massive 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

The simulation follows the rapid expansion of an earthquake wave front on the San Andreas fault as it approaches the city of San Diego. The strongest motions correspond to a white color and the weakest, a red color, with the ground motion magnitude represented as a height field.

The simulation took almost a quarter-million cores of Jaguar and Kraken (both NSF machines at ORNL), and shows the leading edge of the shock front.

via Riding that wave | iSGTW.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .