History

The software package SeisSol (http://www.seissol.org/) allows for realistic simulations of the three-dimensional seismic wavefield propagating in complex Earth structures generated by a finite dynamic earthquake source governed by a constitutive law that describes the relationship between fault stress and slip across a geometrically complex fault. SeisSol is a high-order accurate Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element solver, based on the ADER-DG method presented in Kaser and Dumbser (2006), enabling precise modeling of on-fault frictional failure coupled to seismic waves traveling over large distances in terms of propagated wavelengths with minimal dispersion errors, whereas it is intrinsically dissipative and removes frequencies unresolved by the mesh without affecting longer and physically meaningful wavelengths. de la Puente et al. (2009) and Pelties et al. (2012) introduced Riemann solution to handle discontinuous fault slip conditions and achieve earthquake dynamics with seismic wave propagation.

The software has recently proven to be highly scalable on current and future HPC infrastructure. It reached multi-petaflop/s performance on some of the largest supercomputers worldwide in a pioneering simulation of the 1992 M7.2 Landers earthquake (Heinecke et al., 2014; Breuer et al., 2016). High detail rupture evolution and synthetic ground shaking in the engineering frequency band (0-10 Hz) were modeled on a non-planar earthquake fault structure. In early 2017, SeisSol performed the longest and largest dynamic rupture scenario to date, enabled by local time stepping (Uphoff et al.,2017), resolving the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake including complex splay fault geometries. The paper won the prestigious “Best Paper Award” of the International Supercomputing Conference (SC17). SeisSol results imply that acknowledging geometrical complexity, realistic fault properties, and velocity models affect not only earthquake source dynamics but the synthetic ground shaking crucially. The software package is available to the community as an open-source distribution (https://github.com/SeisSol/SeisSol).