Morgan
Olivia
Evans

As part of UC Irvine's optional computer science senior capstone program, I led a team of six students through a multi-quarter project for KPFF, a global structural engineering firm. Our deliverable was VISTA — Visualization Tools for Structural Analysis — a full-stack 3D visualization tool built in Godot Engine and GDScript, integrating backend OpenSees TCL script processing with an interactive front-end for structural model visualization and post-processing.

I owned front-end design, feature testing, our technical roadmap, all client communication, version control, and sprint tracking in Jira — guiding the team from prototyping through deployment in under six months. Our work earned 3rd place at the UCI Irvine ICS Project Expo.

During the summer of 2024, I worked as a High-Performance Computing Intern at NASA's Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. My work focused on investigating MPI and I/O performance anomalies for the GEOS climate model across multiple production supercomputing clusters and AWS and Azure cloud environments.

Benchmarking was conducted in two parts: OSU micro-benchmarks on AMD Milan architecture across various platforms, and I/O benchmarking on the NCCS Discover cluster comparing file systems. I also implemented and tested various MPI tuning configurations to evaluate communication efficiency and overall system performance. My findings directly contributed to advancing the performance of climate simulations running on NASA's supercomputing infrastructure.

Throughout the 2023-2024 schoolyear, I worked as a remote Computational Research Intern through the ACCESS MATCH Program. My work focused on optimizing GPU-accelerated ice-sheet flow modeling software using NVIDIA profiling tools to analyze performance bottlenecks within CUDA kernels. Through targeted optimizations — removing redundancies, establishing kernel concurrency, and eliminating expensive operations — I reduced overall runtime by approximately 10%. I utilized two Slurm-managed supercomputing clusters to compare runtime, grid points, scale, and error values between test cases. I also began a codebase conversion toward a performance-portable, architecture-agnostic implementation using OpenACC. My research findings contribute to narrowing uncertainty in sea level rise prediction to better understand the effects of climate change.

Note: The performance-portable branch I developed remains active and is maintained in a private fork of the public repository.

At SCEC, I worked as a Computational Research Intern through the SCEC SOURCES Program. Working one-on-one with my research mentor Dr. John Louie, Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno, I developed and ran low-frequency, physics-based 3D seismic wave propagation models using SW4 software for the Wellington, New Zealand region — the highest-resolution simulations ever performed for the area.

My work demonstrated basin amplifications of 2-3x and showed that basin trapped waves extend shaking duration by at least five seconds — results with direct relevance to disaster preparedness in a major seismically active city. In January 2023, SCEC sponsored my travel to Wellington to present a research seminar at Victoria University of Wellington, as well as a meeting with fellow researchers at the GNS Science Institute. This work has been published and presented four times, most recently in the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics in March 2026. Additionally, I authored a revised SW4 Quick Start Install Guide to address outdated official documentation.

Publications:

• Stern, T.A., Louie, J., Evans, M., et al. (2026). "Subsurface Expression of the Lambton Fault and Potential for the Basin Edge Effect in the Wellington Central Business District." New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, 69(1).
• Newton, M.O., Louie, J.N., Stern, T., Pancha, A. (2023). "Exploring the SW4 Synthetic Seismic Performance of the ARCH Rockfish Cluster." Zenodo.
• Louie, J.N., Lewright, L., Newton, M.O., Pancha, A., Stern, T. (2023). "Exploring Basin Amplification Within the Reno, Nevada and Wellington, New Zealand Metropolitan Areas with Non-Ergodic Physics-Based 3D Scenarios." EERI Poster.
• Newton, M.O., Louie, J.N., Stern, T., Pancha, A. (2022). "Low Frequency Non-Ergodic Synthetic Modeling of Earthquake Basin Effects in Wellington, New Zealand." SCEC Annual Meeting Poster.