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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) more than 15 million service units of computer processing time on supercomputers nationwide. This allocation is roughly equivalent to running 2,000 desktop computers continuously for a year. SCEC will use the supercomputing time to greatly improve the detail and scope of its massive simulations of large earthquakes in Southern California. NSF provides funding for about 20 supercomputers throughout the country. Each year, processing time on these computers is allocated as "service units" and is based on review of many proposals. SCEC's award of 15 million service units is quite significant; the next largest award in this round totaled four million units. SCEC won the grant because it was able to show that it could have significant scientific impact and make efficient use of the leading-edge high-performance computing resources in which NSF has invested through the TeraGrid. SCEC's allocation is spread among nine networked supercomputers:

• Indiana University BigRed IBM e1350, 500,000
• NCSA Dell PowerEdge Linux Cluster (Abe), 200,000
• PSC XT3, 1,600,000
• SDSC DataStar IBM p655 (8-way), 700,000
• SDSC DataStar IBM p690 (32-way SMP), 50,000
• SDSC IBM Blue Gene, 3,700,000
• TACC EM64T Linux Cluster (Lonestar), 4,500,000
• TACC Track2 (Ranger), 2,600,000
• TeraGrid Clusters, 1,345,000

Southern California Earthquake Center Advanced Earthquake Research SCEC is a consortium of 55 research institutions worldwide, headquartered at the University of Southern California. Major funding for SCEC is provided by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey. These computational resources will be able to simulate thousands of possible fault-rupture scenarios in Southern California, including the largest breaks on the San Andreas, as part of SCEC's "CyberShake" project. (www.scec.org/cybershake) SCEC will be able to simulate the shaking from the largest and potentially most disastrous earthquakes, such as magnitude eight events on the San Andreas fault that could produce Katrina-scale disasters. Those would be twice as powerful as the biggest earthquakes simulated by SCEC to date. (www.scec.org/terashake) Current simulations are also limited to low-frequency waves. Because low-frequency waves are very long, they mainly affect tall structures, such as high-rises. In order to forecast potential damage to smaller buildings and homes, scientists must simulate waves that are many times higher in frequency, which requires hundreds to thousands of times more computing power. (http://scecdata.usc.edu/petasha/) In addition to the NSF network, SCEC also plans to use the resources of the USC Center for High-Performance Computing and Communications. Participating Organizations include the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), University of Southern California (USC), USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI), San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), San Diego State University (SDSU), University of California, San Diego (UCSD), URS Corporation, Pasadena, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), TeraGrid - NSF-funded Supercomputer facilities and expertise, and National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA).