Earthquake Simulation
Computing a century's worth of shaking in the time it takes a real earthquake to happen once.
Image: USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
From Fault Rupture to Shake Map
Simulating an earthquake means solving the elastic wave equation across a 3D domain that spans hundreds of kilometers while resolving frequencies that matter for building damage — a difference of many orders of magnitude in scale. GPU-based spectral element solvers such as SPECFEM3D and Salvus make this tractable, but only on machines with enough memory bandwidth to move billions of grid points through the compute pipeline every simulated second. Malgukke builds the interconnect and storage fabric that keeps those solvers fed.
HPC Solution Architecture: Fault Rupture to Shake Map
A spectral-element earthquake simulation pipeline, as run on Alps at CSCS:
Running on the TOP500: Alps
Alps — Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Lugano
Alps is ranked No. 8 on the June 2025 TOP500 list with 434.9 petaflops (Rmax), built on 10,752 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper superchips. ETH Zurich's Seismology and Wave Physics group, led by Andreas Fichtner, uses CSCS machines to run full-waveform earthquake and Mars-quake simulations with the Salvus software package — precision that would take a conventional desktop computer more than 100 million years to reach.
Yes — this is a real, currently operating TOP500-ranked system, directly used by ETH Zurich seismologists for the wave-propagation workloads described on this page.
Voices from the Field
ETH Zurich researchers directly involved in bringing wave-physics simulation onto CSCS supercomputers:
Christian Böhm
Seismology and Wave Physics, ETH Zurich / Mondaic
On taking supercomputer-grade full-waveform imaging out of the lab and into everyday infrastructure inspection.
Read articleAndreas Fichtner
Professor of Seismology and Wave Physics, ETH Zurich
On how CSCS supercomputers let his group model seismic sources with a precision impossible on conventional hardware.
Read article