Site-specific numerical simulations of earthquake rupture dynamics and strong ground motion: Application to Swiss NPP’s

Dr. Luis A. Dalguer (ETHZ), Prof. Domenico Giardini (ETHZ), Dr. P. Martin Mai, (KAUST, Saudi Arabia), Dr. D. Fäh (ETHZ)

We use high performance computing simulation to investigate potential earthquakes and the resulted ground motion in site-specific zones near Swiss Nuclear Power Plants (NPP), to assess the level and variability of near-source ground motion in the zone, for the improvement of seismic safety analysis of future and existing NPP’s in Switzerland.

For reliable development of this project, it requires parallelized numerical techniques for multiprocessor execution and highly scalable, enabling high-resolution earthquake simulations. Currently we are running our codes in the Cray XT5 Rosa supercomputer of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). As show in the figure below, our code (SORD) has been tested to up to 8192 processor, with efficient scalability.

_{Figure: Scaling of SORD code on the Cray XT5 Rosa supercomputer from CSCS at Manno, Switzerland.}