The ModelAssembler Community Modeling Environment (MA-CME): Expanded Access to Advanced Seismic Computation

Louie, John N.¹, Shawn Larsen² (1) University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV (2) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,

We introduce MA-CME, an open-source environment for PCs, Macs, and workstations that configures advanced seismic modeling runs. It is intended for use by seismologists, explorationists, engineers, and students. The environment combines geologic and geotechnical data sets with gridding, modeling, and output specifications into portal packs for execution on standalone workstations, clusters, and mega-facilities such as Sun Grid. A tutorial interface helps the user scale the grid to the facilities available, from small test runs to efforts requiring major resources. The ability of MA-CME to configure computations at a range of scales and model complexity is intended to promote wide use of advanced seismic modeling. Wide community use may lead to breakthrough insights into improved interpretation strategies for resource exploration, and into how geology controls earthquake ground motion. Advanced seismic modeling platforms, coupled with increasing availability of faster clusters, have rapidly improved the realism of seismic-survey and earthquake simulations. Yet the number of people able to configure and successfully run simulations through complex geology has not grown. Earthquake simulations have been published only for a few scenarios in a limited number of urban areas. Small companies and academic departments can use new computing facilities such as Sun Grid for advanced seismic modeling without having to invest in clusters or the IT staff to maintain them. The MA-CME package is freely available from www.seismo.unr.edu/ma .

This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract No. W-7405-Eng-48.