Release notes v1.2#

The difference in OpenQuake 1.2 is mostly in the performance of the hazard calculators. They are much faster, sometimes several order of magnitudes faster.

  1. it is possible to avoid saving the individual hazard curves. This is useful for people working with large logic trees and interested only in the mean curves and/or on the quantile curves. Such users should set the configuration parameter individual_curves=false in the job.ini configuration file.

  2. If you computed the hazard at the points specified by an exposure file, later risk calculations do not need to reimport the exposure. This is a significant improvement for large exposures. In practice, if the parameter exposure_file is specified in the job_hazard.ini file, you should removed it from the job_risk.ini file, otherwise it will be reimported.

  3. An optimization has been added for the case where the hazard is known at the sites of the exposure. In that case the hazard data can be extracted directly without geospatial queries and the risk calculation is faster.

  4. The validation system has been rewritten and now it is much more effective and accurate than before, i.e. the user gets better error messages for invalid input. Several bugs in this area have been closed, even if certainly there will be more work to do on this front.

  5. The procedure to import the source models has been improved: it is now faster and more memory efficient.

  6. The risk calculators are now more memory efficient and faster than before; moreover the robustness of the results has improved, bugs have been fixed and several new correcteness tests have been added.

  7. The task distribution in the hazard calculators has improved substantially: now the tasks are more homogeneous in size and it is less likely to have a single slow tasks slowing down the entire computation. Also, there is in place a mechanism to split large sources into small sources, to make the tasks more regular in source size.

  8. The logic tree mechanism for GSIMs has been rewritten and an optimization has been put in place, so that the engine does not perform needless computations for non-relevant tectonic region types (a tectonic region type is not relevant if, even if it is in the logic tree file, there are no sources for that tectonic region type in the source model within the integration distance).

  9. There is now a way to get an HTML report with the performance of the engine:

    $ oq-engine --make-html-report today

    This will list all the computations of the day. You can also specify the date using the ISO format YYYY-MM-DD.

  10. A lot of the logic of the engine has been moved into a different repository, [oq-risklib] (https://github.com/gem/oq-risklib): that means that now it is much easier for hazard and risk scientists to use the libraries underlying the engine programmatically.