Earthquake Shaking Simulation Workflow for Urgent Computing Services: Challenges and Advances

Urgent Computing (UC) refers to the use of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and High-Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) modules during or immediately following emergencies. It typically integrates complex end-to-end workflows with scalable computing resources, where multiple model realizations are necessary to account for input and model uncertainties, all under strict time-to-solution constraints. Enabling urgent HPC in unpredictable events such as earthquakes can significantly enhance resilience and response efforts. The temporal horizon for UC usually spans from minutes to a few hours, providing decision-makers with rapid estimates of the potential outcomes of emergency scenarios. In particular, high-resolution synthetic ground motions for earthquakes can complement the tools used by seismological services for impact analysis. Here, the Urgent Computing Integrated Services for Earthquakes (UCIS4EQ) is proposed as an innovative UC seismic workflow designed to rapidly generate synthetic estimates of the consequences (such as synthetic time histories, shakemaps, PGA/PGV, among other proxies) of moderate to large earthquakes (M > 6). Over the last six years, UCIS4EQ has been developed from scratch and received contributions within the framework of three European projects (DT-GEO, eFlows4HPC, and ChEESE CoE). In this work, we demonstrate the technological maturity of UCIS4EQ and its operational readiness in collaboration with the Mexican Seismological Service (SSN). Furthermore, this work addresses the challenges we face to reach operational maturity addressing the specific requirements of a seismological service for an urgent computing framework providing reliable outcomes for decision making with global coverage.