ACADEMIA

The Swiss platform for High-Performance and High-Productivity Computing (HP2C) is the world's first and only project with the aim of developing optimized scientific simulations for high-performance computers. Seismologists from ETH Zurich are also involved, namely in the "Petaquake" project.

What is the exact structure of the earth's interior? What are the processes that take place there? Where and how do earthquakes originate? These are some of the central questions concerning our planet that we have not yet been able to answer with certainty. A view into the earth's interior similar to computed tomography for a human being could provide these answers, thus helping to improve seismic risk maps. This would be an important basis for assessing the risk of the locations of nuclear power plants or hospitals in Switzerland for example.

Although today's supercomputers can already perform a quadrillion calculation steps per second, the computers and programs for modelling are not sufficiently coordinated to compute high-resolution complex images of the earth's interior in a reasonable period of time. Compared to the human body, screening the earth is a difficult endeavour because earthquakes occur irregularly and seismographs and are spread unevenly across the earth's surface. Also, unlike the X-rays used in computed tomography, there are large portions of the earth's interior that seismic waves do not penetrate. Someday, however, the "Petaquake" project could provide a similar insight into the earth as into the human body. Scientists from the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Domenico Giardini, a professor at ETH, have joined forces with mathematicians and computer scientists from the University of Basel under the supervision of Professors Helmar Burkhart and Marcus Grote as well as PD Olaf Schenk to carry out this project.

"Petaquake" is one of the promising projects launched by the Swiss platform for High-Performance and High-Productivity Computing (HP2C) in 2009. The objective of the HP2C platform is to use interdisciplinary cooperation between hardware manufacturers, computer scientists, mathematicians and end users to develop special methods and algorithms for high-performance computers by 2013 already that will allow complex simulations to be completed in just a few hours in future instead of months or even years.