9419696 Bielak This action is to support a workshop to address the use of advanced computer architectures for the solution of large-scale problems in geotechnical earthquake engineering and strong ground motion seismology, including the application of visualization and animation techniques. The workshop is to be held in the Fall of 1994. The workshop will convene selected researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government to exchange information and ideas, and to provide broad guidelines for the use of this technology. With the advent of supercomputers, earthquake engineers and seismologists have begun to address, mainly with the help of vector multiprocessors, problems of great practical interest, such as the three-dimensional analysis of the seismic response of earthdams and alluvial basins. Anticipated increases in raw computing power over the next five years will not be sufficient for the successful understanding and prediction of the earthquake response of large systems, unless simultaneous advances are made in physical modeling, numerical approximations, parallel algorithms, and software tools for the new generation of high performance parallel systems. Another important aspect of the computational process, which is shared by engineering activities such as field and laboratory experiments, is the need to process and understand vast amounts of numerical data. In recent years advanced visualization and animation techniques have been developed to assist in analyzing and interpreting these large numerical data sets. Thus this workshop will discuss these evolving trends associated with the use of advanced computer architectures and visualization techniques as applied to earthquake hazard mitigation. ***
