Data and workflow management for exascale global adjoint tomography

Striving to comprehend Earth’s interior has been a longstanding pursuit for humankind, and has been fantasized by many, from Dante Alighieri [1] to Jules Vernes [2]. Seismologists see Earth’s interior through seismic waves generated by seismic sources such as earthquakes, oceanic noise, or man-made explosions and recorded by seismic instruments deployed at the surface. The information inherent to these seismic waves, which are sensitive to physical parameters of the medium they propagate through, is used to construct three-dimensional (3D) images of the Earth based on seismic tomography. Advances in the theory of wave propagation and 3D numerical solvers, supported by 280dramatic increases in the amount and quality of seismic data as well as the unprecedented amount of computational power provided by large-scale high-performance computing centers, enables us to greatly improve our understanding of the physics and chemistry of Earth’s interior.