Visualizing Very Large-Scale Earthquake Simulations

This paper presents a parallel adaptive rendering algorithm and its performance for visualizing time-varying unstructured volume data generated from large-scale earthquake simulations. The objective is to visualize 3D seismic wave propagation generated from a 0.5 Hz simulation of the Northridge earthquake, which is the highest resolution volume visualization of an earthquake simulation performed to date. This scalable high-fidelity visualization solution we provide to the scientists allows them to explore in the temporal, spatial, and visualization domain of their data at high resolution. This new high resolution explorability, likely not presently available to most computational science groups, will help lead to many new insights. The performance study we have conducted on a massively parallel computer operated at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center helps direct our design of a simulation-time visualization strategy for the higher-resolution, 1Hz and 2 Hz, simulations.