UC Berkeley

The existing observational database of the regional-scale distribution of strong ground motions and measured building response for major earthquakes continues to be quite sparse. As a result, details of the regional variability and spatial distribution of ground motions, and the corresponding distribution of risk to buildings and other infrastructure, are not comprehensively understood. Utilizing high-performance computing platforms, emerging high-resolution, physics-based ground motion simulations can now resolve frequencies of engineering interest and provide detailed synthetic ground motions at high spatial density. This provides an opportunity for new insight into the distribution of infrastructure seismic demands and risk. In the work presented herein, the EQSIM fault-to-structure computational framework described in a companion paper, McCallen et al., is employed to investigate the regional-scale response of buildings to large earthquakes. A representative M = 7.0 strike-slip event is used to explore the distribution and amplitude of building demand, and comparisons are made between building response computed with fault-to-structure simulations and building response computed with existing measured near-fault earthquake records. New information on the distribution and variability of building response from high-performance parallel simulations is described and analyzed, and favorable first comparisons between building response predicted with both fault-to-structure simulations and real ground motions records are presented.