Animations (cont)

Wave propagation

c. Elastic wave propagation

The animations shown here correspond to elastic wave propagation simulation of an aftershock of the 1994 Northridge earthquake that shook the San Fernando Valley in California. The animations were created by Greg Foss at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), using data produced by the Quake group (J. Bielak, O. Ghattas, D.R. O'Hallaron, J. Shewchuck, L.F. Kallivokas, et al) at Carnegie Mellon. The simulations took place on 256 processors of a CRAY T3D using finite elements on an unstructured mesh modeling a 54km by 33km by 15km area of the San Fernando Valley. The simulated event lasted for 40s; 77 million tetrahedra resulting in 40 million equations were used to resolve the motion in the valley.

San Fernando Valley

Simulation region

Displacement amplitude
(mpg: 911 KB)

Displacement amplitude
and topology

(mpg: 1.06 MB)

Multiple views

(mpg: 26.5 MB)

Other interesting links

1. SPEC code: Wave propagation code, co-authored by D.R. O'Hallaron (CMU) and L.F. Kallivokas (UT), is part of the SPEC CPU 2000 testing suite; SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation corporation) establishes, maintains, and endorses a standardized set of relevant benchmarks and metrics for performance evaluation of modern computer systems.

2. Wave Absorbing Finite Elements: New wave absorbing finite elements are part of the ANSYS element library; the elements have been developed based on our research on absorbing boundaries.

3. Ferguson Structural Engineering Laboratory Camera: Watch live experiments at FSEL (privileged)