Bridging the Macro and Micro: A Computing Intensive Earthquake Study Using Discovery Net

We present the development and use of a novel distributed geohazard modeling environment for the analysis and interpretation of large scale earthquake data sets. Our work demonstrates, for the first time, how earthquake-related surface deformation measured from satellite images using imageodesy algorithms is coupled with analysis and simulation using finite-element numerical models. Our work realises a real time distributed analytical environment where analysis and simulation are closely coupled; integrating high performance implementations of image mining components executing on dedicated Discovery Net servers at Imperial College London, UK and high performance implementations of finiteelement models executing at specialised servers at the University of Oklahoma, USA. Novel scientific results produced using our data sets provide a valuable insight into earthquake analysis. In addition, our informatics work provides a novel high performance computing framework and methods for the application of complex knowledge discovery methods to understanding earthquake dynamics. Furthermore, the realisation of our distributed computing platform is based on the implementation of a set of open standards, making its results accessible over the Grid to the wider scientific community.