This award provides funding to the NSF-funded Engineering Research Center (ERC) at Mississippi State University on Computational Field Simulation for exploratory cross-collaborative research among three groups to advance the state-of-the-art in simulating and visualizing the effects of a large earthquake on an urban region. This proposal will create a distributed simulation framework that integrates earthquake ground motion modeling by Carnegie Mellon University's Quake Project CMU-Quake, modeling of structural and infrastructure systems by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the advanced computational and visualization methods by the ERC on Computational Field Simulation at Mississippi State University. This proposal links together geophysicists, earthquake engineers, computational scientists and engineers, and computer scientist. This integrated model will allow investigation of the relationship between earthquake fault parameters and distribution of various types of damage, ranging from individual components and structures to collective damage to particular classes of structures. This model will provide policy-makers and emergency response agencies with a more complete picture of the effects of a major earthquake on a densely populated region than is possible with current regional damage models.
