A Review of Cloud Computing in Seismology

TL;DR

This review explores how cloud computing platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure facilitate large-scale seismic data analysis, enabling scalable, cost-effective workflows that surpass traditional HPC limitations in seismology research.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of cloud-native workflows in seismology, demonstrating practical applications and discussing benefits, challenges, and solutions for scalable seismic data processing.

Findings

Cloud platforms can process up to 1.3 PB of seismic data in hours to days.

Cloud throughput can match on-premises HPC at similar costs.

Using containers enhances reproducibility and scalability in seismic workflows.

Abstract

Seismology has entered the petabyte era, driven by decades of continuous recordings of broadband networks, the increase in nodal seismic experiments, and the recent emergence of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS). This review explains how commercial clouds - AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure - by providing object storage, elastic compute, and managed databases, enable researchers to "bring the code to the data," thereby overcoming traditional HPC solutions' bandwidth and capacity limitations. After literature reviews of cloud concepts and their research applications in seismology, we illustrate the capacities of cloud-native workflows using two canonical end-to-end demonstrations: 1) ambient noise seismology and cross-correlation, and 2) earthquake detection, discrimination, and phase picking. Both workflows utilized S3 for streaming I/O and DocumentDB for provenance, demonstrating that cloud throughput can rival on-premises HPC at comparable costs, scanning 100 TBs to 1.3 PBs of seismic data in a few hours or days of processing. The review also discusses research and education initiatives, the reproducibility benefits of containers, and cost pitfalls (e.g., egress, I/O fees) of energy-intensive seismological research computing. While designing cloud pipelines remains non-trivial, partnerships with research software engineers enable converting domain code into scalable, automated, and environmentally conscious solutions for next-generation seismology.