Fall 2022 Cloud Computing/HPC Application Award

This award recognizes the team with the best usage of a cloud computing / HPC (High Performance Computing) platform. Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular due to its high flexibility, low cost, no maintenance, and easy collaboration. The Discovery Program provided Microsoft Azure credits or UC Berkeley's Savio computing cluster credits to partners who wished to utilize the platform. This award recognizes the team that made full use of a cloud computing platform to boost the quality of their project and research.

The student researchers worked to quantify the accuracy of the SW4 earthquake simulation model. SW4 is an inelastic finite difference code that is produced with the aid of HPC, and the data was previously obtained through Savio. The team visualized the duration, peak amplitude, and differences between the simulated SW4 program and the observed earthquake data. 

The team acknowledges that biases could be present due to differences in sensor sensitivity and location along the Hayward Fault, and noted that they had issues with data incompatibility and inconsistency. Their conclusion was that the government's SW4 model still has a lot to be desired and that the synthetic data is overly simplistic, having a tendency to underestimate the duration and peak amplitudes of earthquakes.

As a result this project has major implications for determining structural integrity in buildings and better understanding vulnerabilities in geographic areas. The model has potential to be applied to other earthquakes to predict where ground motion would be most detrimental. The extensive usage of cloud computing and HPC to ensure the success of this project earned this team the Cloud Computing / HPC Award.