Public cloud computing for seismological research: Calculating large-scale noise cross-correlations using ALIYUN

The amount of seismological data is rapidly increasing with accumulating observational time and increasing number of stations, requiring modern technique to provide adequate computing power. In present study, we proposed a framework to calculate large-scale noise cross-correlation functions (NCFs) using public cloud service from ALIYUN. The entire computation is factorized into small pieces which are performed parallelly on specified number of virtual servers provided by the cloud. Using data from most seismic stations in China, five NCF databases are built. The results show that, comparing to the time cost using a single server, the entire time can be reduced over two orders of magnitude depending number of evoked virtual servers. This could reduce computation time from months to less than 12 hours. Based on obtained massive NCFs, the global body waves are retrieved through array interferometry and agree well with those from earthquakes. This leads to a solution to process massive seismic dataset within an affordable time and is applicable to other large-scale computing in seismological researches.