The OpenQuake engine version 2.0 ("Keiiti Aki") has been released

[Michele Simionato]

OpenQuake Engine 2.0 completes the architectural rewrite started in the 1.X series: now the engine is faster, needs less memory

and can be installed virtually on every platform.

This version of the engine is dedicated to the japanese seismologist Keiiti Aki.

This is the first version of the engine that comes with installers for Windows

and for macOS in addition to the usual packages for Ubuntu and Red Had Linux.

You can install the engine by following the instructions given here:

https://github.com/gem/oq-engine/blob/master/doc/installing/overview.md

You can download the OpenQuake engine manual from here:

http://www.globalquakemodel.org/openquake/support/documentation/engine/

Virtual machines with the engine pre-installed will be made available shortly.

Please let us know if you have any trouble with the upgrade. Notice that

after the upgrade you will not be able to export the result of calculations

produced with an old version of the engine, so if you need to export something,

please do it before the upgrade.

Michele Simionato on behalf of the OpenQuake Team

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New features of the OpenQuake Engine, version 2.0

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- We have removed the dependency from PostgreSQL and celery and made

the engine installable with zero configuration effort on non-cluster

platforms. As of now, the engine runs natively on Windows,

Mac and Linux. We provide official packages for Ubuntu (12.0, 14.04, 16.04),

Red Had (7), a Windows installer (from XP to Windows 10) and a self extracting

archive for macOS.

- We have improved tremendously the performance of the event based

calculators, both hazard and risk. In large calculations the engine

can be orders of magnitude faster than before; it also use a lot less memory.

We successfully ran event based calculations with half million assets.

- We have reduced significantly the data transfer in classical PSHA

calculations, reduced the memory footprint and speed up the calculator.

The net effect is a lot less visible than for the event based, but

still positive. Also, now it is possible to set different integration

distances for different tectonic region types: this may have a very positive

effect on the performance.

- We have introduced a command `oq` with a lot of new functionalities; we deprecated

the old command `oq-engine`, which has been replaced by `oq engine`.

- As usual there were a lot of bug fixes, including a very

significant one in the event based risk calculator in presence of a

complex logic tree. We removed some deprecated functionality.  We

improved the serialization of Python objects into HDF5 objects.

Internally a lot of refactoring has been done, and the HDF5 structure

has changed.

- We fixed some issues in the WebUI and made sure it works on Windows.

By default each user can see the computations run by the other users,

but it is also possible to remove such feature.

- There was a lot of work on the exporters and several bugs were fixed.

Now virtually all of them export floats in exponential notation with 5

decimal digits. For the first time we have official CSV exports for

several output types.

- In the event based calculator the user can specify a minimum intensity

for each Intensity Measure Type to ignore any ground motion value below

the threshold. The saving of the asset loss table has been optimized,

with a measured speedup of three orders of magnitude. Moreover, we

optimized the case when the epsilons are not required, i.e. all the

covariance coefficients are zero in the vulnerability functions.

- It is possible to export some data about the ruptures generated by

the event based calculator, including the occurrence rate.

- We revisited the weighting of the tasks to have a better task distribution.

- Several new views of the datastore were added and the reports improved.

- In hazardlib we fixed Z1.0 units bug in Abrahamson, Silva and Kamai (2014)

We added modifications to Zhao (2006) inslab GMPE and implemented

Atkinson (2008), needed for 2014 US NSHMP.

- We backported `libhdf5` and `h5py` from Ubuntu 14.04 to the Ubuntu

12.04 series, thus the engine still works on Ubuntu 12.04 even if

this platform is officially deprecated (it has been deprecated for

a long time).

- A lot more was done and interested people should look at the

changelogs: https://github.com/gem/oq-hazardlib/blob/engine-2.0/debian/changelog and

https://github.com/gem/oq engine/blob/engine-2.0/debian/changelog.

Over two hundred pull requests were closed in the GEM repositories.