Parallelization of a large-scale computational earthquake simulation program

Here we detail both the methods and preliminary results of the first efforts to parallelize three General Earthquake Model (GEM)-related codes: (1) a relatively simple data mining procedure based on a genetic algorithm; (2) a mean-field slider block model; and (3) the Virtual California simulation of GEM. These preliminary results, using a simple, heterogeneous system of processors, existing freeware and an extremely low initial cost in both manpower and hardware dollars, motivate us to more ambitious work with considerably larger-scale computer earthquake simulations of southern California. The GEM computational problem, which is essentially a Monte Carlo simulation, is well suited to optimization on parallel computers and we outline how we are proceeding in implementing this new software architecture.