The investigators propose to develop a Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG) which will develop, support, and disseminate community-accessible software for the greater geodynamics community from model developers to end-users. The software will be developed for problems ranging widely from mantle and core dynamics, crustal and earthquake dynamics, magma migration, seismology, and related topics. With a high level of community participation, CIG would leverage the state-of-the-art in scientific computing into a suite of open-source tools and codes. The infrastructure would consists of: (a) a coordinated effort to develop reusable, well-documented and open-source geodynamics software; (b) the basic building blocks - an infrastructure layer - of software by which state-of-the-art modeling codes could be quickly assembled; (c) extension of existing software frameworks to interlink multiple codes and data through a superstructure layer; (d) strategic partnerships with the larger world of computational science and geoinformatics; (e) specialized training and workshops for both the geodynamics and larger Earth science communities; and (f) modest hardware resources for software development and community use.
CIG is proposing to house a small core team of dedicated software architects and engineers whose work will be guided by scientific objectives formulated by the geodynamics community. This Software Development Team will provide full software service to the community in terms of programming, documentation, training, and full-time support. Guidance for the programmers will come from standing committees and task groups whose emphasis is to identify and balance common needs across disciplines. The software development team will be housed in the Center for Innovative Technologies (CIT 2 ), a new off campus facility in Pasadena, which would be managed by Caltech for the benefit of the national geodynamics community. Intellectual Merit: CIG would enable scientific progress in multiple areas of geodynamics, by providing the computational infrastructure needed for vastly improved modeling. Through CIG, computational geodynamics will become connected with two much larger scientific thrusts: Scientific computing and geoinformatics. The CIG initiative has already started to leverage and develop long-term strategic partnerships with open source development efforts within both areas.
These strategic partnerships are essential as the frontier has moved into multi-scale and multi-physics problems in which many investigators now want to use simulation software for data interpretation, data assimilation, and hypothesis testing. The impending flood of data from the EarthScope initiative provides a unique opportunity to develop computational infrastructure in geodynamics for the benefit of the entire Earth science community.
Broader Impacts: CIG will have a broad impact upon our science through the creation of programming support and software infrastructure that will outlast the research efforts of any individual researcher and increase the rate of scientific discovery by providing the means to routinely and rapidly solve formerly intractable problems. CIG will not only provide the means of linking geodynamics with computational science and geoinformatics, but it will foster communication between different subdisciplines. CIG will impact geoscience through multi- and interdisciplinary conferences, workshops, and collaborations, and by educating a new generation of Earth scientists in state-of-the-art methods of computational geodynamics.
