.bmp)
.bmp)
Only in California will you soon be able to experience a lifethreatening earthquake and watch a locally made,supercomputer-generated,3-D movie of that shaking ground within 30 minutes of the first jolt.A digital chain reaction is now in place,on purpose,so that scientists at Caltech and the San Diego SupercomputerCenter (SDSC)can use data from a network of ground sensors and supercomputers to turn an earthquake into a near real-time animated movie that the public can watch on home computers or on TV as soon as the news breaks.In fact,Caltech and the SDSC will make the first movie of this kind available to the media and public information providers the next time a magnitude-3.5 or greater earthquake strikes Southern California,which could be any day now.When an earthquake rattles Southern California,seismic recorders scattered at hundreds of stations across the earthquake-prone region constantly measure ground motion,providing seismologists with information to determine the temblor's epicenter,depth and intensity,explained Jeroen Tromp,a computational seismologist of Caltech who works with SDSC to make the movies.
Caltech scientists collect the data.For earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.5 or greater,which typically strike once or twice a month,the information is fed into a SDSC supercomputer called OnDemand.Rather than waiting several hours or days for results,a sophisticated computer model can produce a simulation of the ground motion in the area within about 28 minutes.The OnDemand is a Dell cluster run by open-source Linux operation software and made up of 256 processors.It has a theoretical peak performance of 2.4 teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second, and floating-point is an encoding system that makes it easy to work with extremely long numbers).OnDemand is funded by the National Science Foundation.
To read more go to:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070801/sc_livescience/supercomputermakesnearinstantmoviesofcaliforniaquakes
As in the days of Noah...
