Dell Powers Super Cluster to Analyize Earthquakes in California
California Institute of Technology, One of the most powerful computer clusters in the academic world has been created at the California Institute of Technology in order to unlock the mysteries of earthquakes

Computer hardware fills long rows of black racks in the facility, each contains about 35 compute nodes. Massive air conditioning units line an entire wall of the 20-by-80-foot room to re-circulate and chill the air. Miles of optical-fiber cables tie the processors together into a working cluster that went online in September.

The $5.8 million parallel computing project was made possible by gifts from Dell, Myricom, Intel, and the National Science Foundation.

According to Jeroen Tromp, McMillan Professor of Geophysics and director of the Institute's Seismology Lab, who spearheaded the project, "The other crucial ingredient was Caltech's investment in the infrastructure necessary to house the new machine," he says. Some 500 kilowatts of power and 90 tons of air conditioning are needed to operate and cool the hardware.

David Kewley, the project's systems administrator, explained that's enough kilowatts to power 350 average households.

The Dell equipment consists of 1,024 dual Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers that were pre-assembled for easy implementation. Dell Services representatives came to campus to complete the installation

In simulations involving tens of millions of operations per second, the seismic waves are propagated from one slice to the next, as they speed up, slow down, and change direction according to the earth's characteristics. The model is analogous to a CAT scan of the earth, allowing scientists to track seismic wave paths. "Much like a medical doctor uses a CAT scan to make an image of the brain, seismologists use earthquake-generated waves to image the earth's interior," Tromp says, adding that the earthquake's location, origin time, and characteristics must also be determined

Tromp will now be able to deliver better, more accurate models in less time. "We hope to use the new machine to do much more detailed mapping. In addition to improving the resolution of our images of the earth's interior, we will also quantitatively assess the devastating effects associated with earthquakes based upon numerical simulations of strong ground motion generated by hypothetical earthquakes."

"One novel way in which we are planning to use the new machine is for near real-time seismology," Tromp adds. "Every time an earthquake over magnitude 3.5 occurs anywhere in California we will routinely simulate the motions associated with the event. Scientific products that result from these simulations are 'synthetic' seismograms that can be compared to actual seismograms."

The "real" seismograms are recorded by the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN), operated by the Seismo Lab in conjunction with the U.S. Geological Survey. Of interest to the general public, Tromp expects that the collaboration will produce synthetic ShakeMovies of recent quakes, and synthetic ShakeMaps which can be compared to real ShakeMaps derived from the data. "These products should be available within an hour after the earthquake," he says. The Seismology Lab Media Center will be renovated with a large video wall on which scientists can show the results of simulations and analysis. The new generation of seismic knowledge may also help scientists, engineers, and others lessen the potentially catastrophic effects of earthquakes