Technical Breakthrough Abstract

Evaluation of the DEEPSOIL Software on

the DesignSafe Cyberinfrastructure
Michael Musgrove, S.M.ASCE 1; Joseph Harmon, S.M.ASCE 2;
Youssef M. A. Hashash, Ph.D., F.ASCE 3; and Ellen Rathje, Ph.D., F.ASCE 4
DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)GT.1943-5606.0001755 Table 1. Performance Metrics for Set of 73,000 Analyses

In seismic site response analysis, uncertainties in both soil proper- Runtime Wall time
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ties and earthquake ground motions are typically assessed in a System Number Runtime Wall time speedup speedup
metric of CPUs (core-hours) (days) (%) (%)
probabilistic manner by conducting Monte Carlo simulations for
a large number of combinations of soil profiles and ground motions Cluster 8 1,686 8.5 — —
(e.g., Pehlivan et al. 2016) and can be computationally costly. The Stampede 64 1,540 1 8.7 88.2
DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure (www.designsafe-ci.org, Rathje
et al. 2017) component of the NSF-supported Natural Hazards
Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI, Grant No. CMMI-
1520817) aims to address the computational needs of researchers Table 2. Performance Metrics for Set of 1.7 Million Analyses
by providing a cloud-based computational platform for engineering
Runtime Wall time
simulations on the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced
System Number Runtime Wall time speedup speedup
Computing Center (TACC) located at the University of Texas at metric of CPUs (core-hours) (days) (%) (%)
Austin.
One of the first simulation tools to be evaluated for deployment Cluster 94 20,767 11 — —
Stampede 2,048 17,715 0.36 14.7 96.7
as part of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure is DEEPSOIL. The 4,096 17,272 0.18 16.8 98.4
DEEPSOIL software is an equivalent linear and nonlinear one-
dimensional (1D) seismic site response analysis tool widely used
in both academia and engineering practice that has been in active
development at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign required for the simulations was reduced from approximately
since 1998. 11 days to 4.5 h (a 98% reduction).
The trial deployment of DEEPSOIL on Stampede was evaluated
using 1.7 million analyses and a smaller subset of 73,000 analyses
from the Next Generation Attenuation Relationships for Central
Implications
and Eastern North America project (NGA-East) (Harmon 2017).
This set of simulations was the largest study of its kind to date The availability of DEEPSOIL on the DesignSafe computing
in the field of geotechnical earthquake engineering. platform will allow researchers to conduct unprecedentedly
Tables 1 and 2 compare the runtimes for the NGA-East analyses large-scale simulations. The computational cost of site response
on Stampede with the runtimes of the same set of analyses on a simulations is dramatically reduced, allowing researchers and prac-
small cluster of servers with hardware similar to the computing no- titioners to focus on designing suites of simulations to capture the
des of Stampede. On average, each analysis completed 16.8% effects of variability and uncertainty of soil and ground motion
faster on Stampede as a result of slightly faster processors, a reduc- properties and on understanding the role uncertainty has on site
tion in overhead coordinating thousands of concurrent analyses, response and amplification for use with reliability-based design
and a reduction in the amount of data being read from and written standards. Additional evaluation is currently underway to deter-
to disk. By scaling the study and distributing the analyses to 4,096 mine how DEEPSOIL results can be efficiently processed with
CPUs (running 4,096 concurrent analyses), the total wall time the data analysis tools available on DesignSafe to enable rapid
adoption of high-performance computing by researchers and prac-
ticing engineers in the near future.
1
Graduate Research Assistant, Dept. of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801
(corresponding author). E-mail: mmusgro2@illinois.edu; mike.musgrove@ References
gmail.com
2
Graduate Research Assistant, Dept. of Civil and Environ- DEEPSOIL version 6.1 [Computer software]. Board of Trustees of
mental Engineering, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL.
IL 61801. Harmon, J. A. (2017). “Nonlinear site amplification functions for
3
Hall Endowed Professor, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, central and Eastern North America.” Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Illinois at
Univ. of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801. Urbana–Champaign, Champaign, IL.
4
Bellows Centennial Professor, Dept. of Civil, Architectural, and Pehlivan, M., Rathje, E. M., and Gilbert, R. B. (2016). “Factors influencing
Environmental Engineering, Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX 78712. soil surface seismic hazard curves.” Soil Dyn. Earthquake Eng., 83,
Note. This manuscript was submitted on January 28, 2017; approved 180–190.
on March 21, 2017; published online on June 10, 2017. This technical Rathje, E. M., et al. (2017). “DesignSafe: A new cyberinfrastructure for
breakthrough abstract is part of the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoen- natural hazards engineering.” Nat. Hazards Rev., 10.1061/(ASCE)NH
vironmental Engineering, © ASCE, ISSN 1090-0241. .1527-6996.0000246, 06017001.

© ASCE 02817005-1 J. Geotech. Geoenviron. Eng.

J. Geotech. Geoenviron. Eng., 2017, 143(9): 02817005