Workshop in Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG)

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

In order to overcome deficiencies in geodynamics software, the geophysics community has been formulating a plan for Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG), whose purpose will be to leverage the current state of the art in scientific computing into a suite of toolkits and codes that serve the greater geodynamics community from pure modelers to users of existing models. The emphasis is on developing toolkits that ease model development and foster the interchange of ideas and algorithms. If successful, this effort promises to revolutionize the way our community computes by providing tools and services that allow us to focus more on the science and less on the science-neutral parts of high-performance computation. The goal is to empower a larger community of students, researchers, educators with the tools for quantitative hypothesis testing. In order to continue to broaden participation from the geophysics community as the vision for and structure of CIG are finalized and the proposal to fund it are prepared, we propose to hold a workshop, open to the entire community January 16-17, 2004. By holding the workshop at this time we are hoping to strike a balance between our desire to maintain momentum in the CIG initiative with the need for continued engagement with the community. Our objective is for participants to expend as little time as possible traveling to the workshop venue. It is for this reason that we propose to hold the two-day workshop in a hotel with appropriate conference facilities immediately adjacent to the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Our hope is to have about 50 scientists at the workshop with the majority of the participants spread through the computational geodynamics community in such a way that we maintain balance between the various sub disciplines as well as between junior and senior scientists. In addition, we also plan to invite members of the computer science and computational science communities who we hope to engage in our planning. Their participation will allow the geophysics participants to better understand how they can take advantage of advances in information technology and computational science. Broader Impacts: The broader impacts of this workshop are likely to be substantial. We believe that this workshop will allow the geophysics community to come together in a final push to advance CIG. CIG will likely alter geophysics by strengthening the infrastructure available to all researchers. CIG will also substantially alter the way graduate students in computational geophysics are trained in the US.