Petascale simulations are needed to understand the rupture and wave dynamics of the largest earthquakes at shaking frequencies required to engineer safe structures (> 1 Hz). Toward this goal, we have developed a highly scalable, parallel application (AWP-ODC) that has achieved “M8”: a full dynamical simulation of a magnitude-8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas fault up to 2 Hz. M8 was calculated using a uniform mesh of 436 billion 40-m3cubes to represent the three-dimensional crustal structure of Southern California, in a 800 km by 400 km area, home to over 20 million people. This production run producing 360 sec of wave propagation sustained 220 Tflop/s for 24 hours on NCCS Jaguar using 223,074 cores. As the largest-ever earthquake simulation, M8 opens new territory for earthquake science and engineering - the physics-based modeling of the largest seismic hazards with the goal of reducing their potential for loss of life and property.

Abstract The creation of a contemporary artwork –The Scalable City—explores the possibilities and implications of new technologies in general and the Cell processor (CP) in particular. In general, new technologies provide new methods for describing and acting in the world. Creating new forms of art can be a means of understanding and furthering this process; however, this has not been the typical relationship between the leading edges of cultural and technological experiments in the 20 th century. The approaches taken to create The Scalable City provide an example of how these goals can correlate in an effective way, as its aim is the creation of a 3D interactive graphics application, highlighting the ongoing algorithmicization of the world at large. In its creation, computational bottlenecks have been encountered, which compromised its aesthetic and conceptual goals. The core component of this work is a world depicting transforming landscapes, networks of roads and emergent structures. Within the operation of the artwork, each is transformed by interactions of the viewer, algorithms and the initial data. The computational demands of some of these transformations exceed the capability of standard methods using a single host compute environment. Sheldon Brown and the members of his Experimental Game Lab at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD developed means of using CP compute servers to overcome these limitations. The authors detail their encounters with Cell processing, from initial efforts, discovery of the affordances and limitations of Cell processing, and its eventual application to the project. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.