Advances in Geocomputing

Numerical modelling is being an advanced tool in geoscience and geoengineering. Idealized experiments and field observations have been the main pillars of geoscience for decades, while the rapid development of supercomputers leads to a paradigm shift towards geocomputing. Hi- performance computing based simulations offer outstanding opportunities to get insights into increasingly complex geoscience and geoengineering problems. Several new institutes and initiatives with special emphasis on hi- performance geocomputing have been established around the world, such as ACcESS MNRF (Australian Computational Earth System Simulator, Major National Research Facility, http://www. access. edu. au) and AuScope (an organisation for a National Earth Science Infrastructure Program, http://www. auscope. org. au) in Australia; GEON (GEOscience Network, http://www. geongrid. org/), PRAGMA (Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly, http://www. pragma-grid. net/ ), SERVO (Solid Earth Virtual Research Observatory, http://www. servogrid. org/), PetaSHA (Petascale Cyberfacility for Physics-based Seismic Hazard Analysis from Southern California Earthquake Center, including TeraShake etc. platforms, http://scecdata. usc. edu/petasha/) and CIG (Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics, http://www. geodynamics. org) in the United States; GeoFEM (http://geofem. tokyo. rist. or. jp) and CHIKAKU system (http://www. riken. go. jp/lab-www/CHIKAKU/index-e. html), and the Earth Simulator Center (www. es. jamstec. go. jp/) in Japan; the Laboratory of Computational Geodynamics of Chinese Academy of Sciences in China; and the iSERVO seed project (iSERVO-international Solid Earth Virtual Research Observatory, http://www. iservo. edu. au) aims to foster ongoing international cooperation on simulation of solid earth phenomena.