Computational Challenges in Seismology

Seismology and engineering seismology have been dramatically affected by the emergence of high-performance computing. A recent report by the National Research Council's Committee on Seismology (NRC, 1996) is entirely devoted to surveying the status and potential of high-performance computing activities in this field. Here we summarize several applications and focus on one particular problem, the modeling and forecasting of complex earthquake ground motion in large basins, in order to illustrate the computational resources that are required for tackling successfully this type of problem.