SeisSol as a Community Code for Reproducible Computational Seismology - CoCoReCS

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Michael Bader; Dr. Alice-Agnes Gabriel; Dr. Gerald Mathias, since 7/2021
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Geophysics
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391134334

The software package SeisSol (www.seissol.org) enables the simulation of complex problems in computational seismology with high-order accuracy on high-performance computing platforms. SeisSol has excellent potential for a wide range of applications with high impact on society and industry, such as the simulation of induced earthquakes (by geothermal power plants or CO2 storage processes, e.g.) and physics-based seismic hazard assessment.A particularly successful use-case is the multi-physics simulation of the non-linear dynamic rupture process of earthquakes coupled to the resulting seismic wave propagation in geometrically complex, highly detailed models -- such as the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman Megathrust Earthquake.In 2015, SeisSol has been released as an open-source project (github.com/SeisSol).While several pilot users have taken up the software, the following three issues have been identified to hinder a widespread adoption of SeisSol by Earth scientists:(1) Generating suitable unified geometric (CAD) model representations and high-quality discretisation meshes for SeisSol is, in general, a challenging task, which only recently became feasible.(2) While SeisSol is available as open-source (incl. a versatile software infrastructure and documentation), it still lacks installation support, tutorials and usage examples that guide potential users which are in general not highly experienced in high performance computing approaches. (3) For a widespread acceptance of SeisSol in the community it needs to provide an open platform to host reproducible simulation scenarios -- from established benchmarks for code validation, successful implementation of specific modelling requirements to production-ready scenarios allowing on-demand urgent simulations.In this project, we want to tackle all three roadblocks:(1) Provide a well-documented workflow to generate meshes of complex Earth structures, using commercial and open-source CAD and meshing software.(2) Establish training material and (face-to-face and online) introduction courses for potential users in the Computational Seismology community. (3) Design and install an infrastructure that maintains a wide range of reproducible simulation scenarios, ranging from benchmark simulations for constant software validation to scenarios that allow production runs for seismic hazard assessment. The best practices we will establish are of particular interest for supercomputing centres, which currently lack procedures for maintaining simulation software together with model scenarios and input data for real-time computation.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Anton Frank, until 6/2021