About us

The Computational Seismology Group (CSG) is part of the Earthquake Surveillance of the Swiss Seismological Service (SED) at ETH-Zurich. We are working on building a center that assembles algorithms and codes with computational and geoscience expertise for high-performance computing (HPC) simulation of earthquakes, primarily to investigate rupture dynamics and near source ground motion characteristics, for science and engineering applications. We involve graduate students for implementing, validating, and applying new earthquake simulation technologies. Our group possesses the most highly accurate and efficient Finite Difference (FD), Spectral Element (SE) and Boundary Integral Element (BIE) Numerical Codes, worldwide recognized in the scientific community of earthquake rupture dynamic.

Our studies, that involve large computations, are performed on:

1. The Cray XT5 Rosa supercomputer from Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) with up to 22128 cores (http://www.cscs.ch/index.php);
2. The Brutus central cluster of ETH Zurich with a total of 8756 processor cores (http://clusterwiki.ethz.ch/wiki/index.php/Brutus);
3. The Stella small high-performance Linux cluster at the Institute of Geophysics ETH-Zurich with up to 20 processors (https://stella.ethz.ch/);
4. Our local Sun fire 64 GB shared memory with up to 32 cores.