Located in the Pacific Ring of Fire, Taiwan is of the most earthquake prone countries in the world. Earthquake engineering experts and structural engineers make efforts on safeguarding the principle of collapse-free under severe major earthquakes. However, neither current seismic design codes nor underway performance-based design guides provide a reliable simulation method to represent complicated behaviors of structural collapse. One of the bottlenecks is that the usage and practical applications of refined structural models are impeded by their large amount of finite element computations.

 

This nano-course gives a brief introduction on how scientific computing and high-performance computing technology impact the earthquake engineering industry and public safety. It describes the fundamental concepts of seismic design criteria, the structural analysis applications to seismic design, the computing intensive parts of finite element analysis, and why the high performance computing is required. A hands-on workshop is included in this talk guiding students to complete a simple seismic design job by using an open source finite element analysis tool.