From The Register, August 13:
The world's most powerful known supercomputer stretches its legs with some life-saving science
Eggheads working on El Capitan, the world's most powerful publicly known supercomputer, have developed a new tsunami forecasting system that could dramatically improve response times in coastal communities.
In the event of a large-scale earthquake along the US Pacific Northwest, residents may have as little as 10 minutes before the waves strike, leaving little time for evacuation, researchers explained in a blog post on Tuesday.
"Conventional tsunami warning systems often rely on seismic and geodetic data to infer earthquake magnitude and location, but typically use simplistic models that fail to capture the complexity of fault ruptures, which can lead to false alarms or dangerously late warnings," the authors explained.
The new forecast model, developed as part of collaboration between Lawrence Livermore National Lab, the Oden Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, sought to improve on existing tsunami forecast models enabling real-time tracking of conditions, providing residents more time to get to high ground.
"This framework represents a paradigm shift in how we think about early warning systems," Omar Ghattas, professor of mechanical engineering and principal faculty in the Oden Institute, explained in the post. "For the first time, we can combine real-time sensor data with full-physics modeling and uncertainty quantification - fast enough to make decisions before a tsunami reaches the shore."
This involved generating a massive library of physics data linking earthquake-related seafloor motion to tsunamis. And to do it, researchers employed nearly every FLOP of compute the El Capitan supercomputer could muster to solve what's known as a Bayesian inversion problem....
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