Introduction to this special section: High-performance computing in geophysics

The dramatic increase in compute power over recent decades has revolutionized science across nearly every discipline. Advanced computational resources have enabled researchers to simulate complex systems, analyze massive data sets, and accelerate discoveries that once were thought impossible. This computational leap has not only streamlined established workflows but also facilitated the emergence of entirely new fields, such as artificial intelligence (AI), computational biology, and climate modeling, fundamentally reshaping the landscape of scientific inquiry. Geophysics is no different. Increases in raw compute power have touched nearly all subdisciplines of geophysics, especially seismic. The industry has gone from acquiring, on average, 100 traces per square kilometer in the 1980s to 10 million traces per square kilometer in the 2020s. Our work has shifted from time-domain processing to executing high-frequency elastic full-waveform inversion (FWI) on commercial projects. We continue to generate new ideas, and our demand for increased computational power shows no sign of slowing anytime soon.