SDSC Undergraduate Intern Enhances Earthquake Sim Code at Scale

Published August 27, 2024

Palla’s internship experience has involved work on top supercomputers such as Frontier at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and Frontera at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. With TACC’s Frontera, he worked on a team that simulated 83 seconds of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in the LA basin.

By: Sneha Lele and Kimberly Mann Bruch, SDSC Communications

For the past two years, UC San Diego Computer Science Student Akash Palla has been involved with an array of research projects with the High Performance GeoComputing Laboratory (HPGeoC) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego. Working with HPGeoC Director Yifeng Cui, Palla has optimized a real-world earthquake wave propagation code to run more effectively on high performance resources including Frontier, the world’s most powerful supercomputer to date housed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

“My experience under Dr. Cui these past two years has been an invaluable opportunity to apply and extend upon the foundational knowledge I gained during my undergraduate degree at UCSD, and I am grateful to continue this work as a graduate student,” Palla said. ”It has been inspiring to see the meaningful impacts and scale of my and our lab’s work, deploying and running code across multiple supercomputers nationwide and scaling up to thousands of nodes and GPUs.”

Palla said that this research internship has helped him build on the conceptual knowledge learned in UC San Diego’s parallel computing courses (CSE 160 and CSE 260) and apply that knowledge to applications on a large scale.

Palla started his SDSC internship with a Microsoft Azure Accelerator project, in which, Cui said that, Palla “single handedly completed the installation of code, compiler and the environment, for the experiment of end-to-end simulation pipeline in the cloud.”

Also involved in supporting a nonlinear earthquake simulation running on nearly a half million of CPU cores, Palla created the visualizations of the Big One along the San Andreas Fault.

Most recently, Pala has ported and optimized a state-of-the-art earthquake simulation code on Frontier. “Palla’s work, such as the one on Frontier involving complex surface topography and detailed underground structures, made possible of petascale 3D wave propagation simulations of earthquake ground motions on the system, where quadrillions of calculations per second were achieved,” Cui said. “We recently presented this work at annual meetings for the National Science Foundation CSSI project and for the Statewide California Earthquake Center (SCEC).”

In addition to his experience at SDSC, this summer Palla has been working as a software engineering intern for Roblox where he utilizes several packages for infrastructure and observability tasks.