With the European Project Trisee the CRS4, along with Italian and European partners, promotes an innovative activity aimed to simulate the soil-structure interaction effects in the presence of earthquakes and man-made vibrations.
These large-scale computational problems require a double effort, both for the development of optimized numerical algorithms and the need of HPC (High Performance Computing) capabilities. To meet these requirements, an innovative solver based on spectral elements (SEM) is designed.
In subsequent years, SEM are further developed to deal with complex geometries and match the state-of-the-art HPC technology: the CRS4 code is used to address several large-scale applications of relevance in the geotechnical community.
The SEM are also extended to include different physical models like thermoelasticity, electromagnetics, acoustics and electrical activity of biological tissues.
As an example, we report the simulation of the propagation of man-made vibrations inside the Colosseum: the analysis is based on a grid of fully unstructured hexahedra grid complying with architectural details and structural properties. It has more than 10 million degrees of freedom, a remarkable amount for the time.
