Abstract: We introduce the Forward Observer system, which is designed to provide data assurance in field data acquisition while receiving significant amounts (several terabytes per flight) of Synthetic Aperture Radar data during flights over the polar regions, which provide unique requirements for developing data collection and processing systems. Under polar conditions in the field and given the difficulty and expense of collecting data, data retention is absolutely critical. Our system provides a storage and analysis cluster with software that connects to field instruments via standard protocols, replicates data to multiple stores automatically as soon as it is written, and provides pre-processing of data so that initial visualizations are available immediately after collection, where they can provide feedback to researchers in the aircraft during the flight.

Abstract: In order to simulate an earthquake shock originating from the earthquake source and the damage it causes to buildings, not only the seismic wave that propagates over a wide region of several 100 km2, but also the building vibrations that occur over a small region of several 10 m2 must be resolved concurrently. Such a multi-scale simulation is difficult because such kind of modeling and implementation by only a specific application are limited. To overcome these problems, a multi-scale weak-coupling simulation of seismic wave and building vibrations using "ppOpen-HPC" libraries is conducted. The ppOpen-HPC, wherein "pp" stands for "post-peta scale", is an open source infrastructure for development and execution of optimized and reliable simulation codes on large-scale parallel computers. On the basis of our evaluation, we confirm that an acceptable result can be achieved that ensures that the overhead cost of the coupler is negligible and it can work on large-scale computational resources.

Abstract: In the Netherlands, for coastal and inland water applications, wave modelling with SWAN has become a main ingredient. However, computational times are relatively high. Therefore we investigated the parallel efficiency of the current MPI and OpenMP versions of SWAN. The MPI version is not that efficient as the OpenMP version within a single node. Therefore, in this paper we propose a hybrid version of SWAN. It combines the efficiency of the current OpenMP version on shared memory with the capability of the current MPI version to distribute memory over nodes. We describe the numerical algorithm. With initial numerical experiments we show the potential of this hybrid version. Parallel I/O, further optimization, and behavior for larger number of nodes will be subject of future research.

Abstract: Numerical verification of postseismic crustal deformation analysis, computed using a large-scale finite element simulation, was carried out, by proposing new criteria that consider the characteristics of the target phenomenon. Specifically, pointwise displacement was used in the verification. In addition, the accuracy of the numerical solution was explicitly shown by considering the observation error of the data used for validation. The computational resource required for each analysis implies that high-performance computing techniques are necessary to obtain a verified numerical solution of crustal deformation analysis for the Japanese Islands. Such verification in crustal deformation simulations should take on greater importance in the future, since continuous improvement in the quality and quantity of crustal deformation data is expected.