| The objective of our study is to image the physical properties of the Earth?s upper mantle under Europe using cutting-edge waveform tomographic techniques. They will allow us to infer, for the first time ever, the complete elastic, anelastic, anisotropic and density structure of the European continent. Our work will benefit from our group?s vast experience in seismic tomography and the interpretation of tomographic models in terms of thermochemical Earth structure. The need for supercomputing arises from the requirement to simulate the propagation of seismic waves through strongly heterogeneous Earth models. Specific computing-intensive tasks fall into two categories: (1) the simulation of seismic wave propagation through strongly heterogeneous Earth models using spectral-element solvers of the elastic wave equation, and (2) the computation of Frechet kernels that are needed for the iterative solution of the tomographic problem. |
