Achievements and Experiences from a Grid-Based Earthquake Analysis and Modelling Study

We have developed and used a grid-based geoinformatics infrastructure and analytical methods for investigating the relationship between macro and microscale earthquake deformational processes by linking geographically distributed and computationally intensive earthquake monitoring and modelling tools. Using this infrastructure, measurement of lateral co-seismic deformation is carried out with imageodesy algorithms running on servers at the London eScience Centre. The resultant deformation field is used to initialise geomechanical simulations of the earthquake deformation running on supercomputers based at the University of Oklahoma. This paper describes the details of our work, summarizes our scientific results and details our experiences from implementing and testing the distributed infrastructure and analysis workflow.