Work Plan

2014-2015

Short Term (1-2 years)    

• Identify selected analytical cases to be used as a basis for accuracy benchmarks (verification)
• Begin work on a community benchmark(s) of available and in-development codes
• Begin development of tutorials
• Invite initial donations to CIG for benchmarking and testing.
• Establish partnerships between CIG and EarthScope.

Intermediate Term (2-4 years)

• Develop educational use case and tools.
• Establish a set of community benchmarks that are the standard for all future code efforts.
• Investigate the applicability of using cloud or grid computing for both educational and research efforts
• Investigate the applicability of including virtual machines in tutorials.
• Improve and increase access to computing resources for the research community.

Long Term (beyond)

• Converge on community best practices for LTT modeling. 
• Create a user-oriented framework for evaluation of community codes - matching computational and scientific methods, capabilities, and resources to science needs.

Ongoing

• Regular, dedicated meetings to promote interaction amongst the LTT community.  Meetings will also help raise awareness in the LTT and larger community about the philosophy, best practices, and methods of numerical modeling and code development.

Past Activity

2013-2014

The LTT community is working towards defining the requirements necessary to address its computational needs.  Problems in lithospheric modeling span a broad range in both scales of length and time and cut across disciplinary boundaries, resulting in many challenging numerical and computational issues. As a result, historically codes addressed a narrow range of LTT-related scientific problems. Scientific progress, however, would benefit from an open source, extensible and usable code(s).

To that end, the community has been taking a series of steps to help define the problems and current capabilities in lithospheric modeling.  The first step this past year was a workshop to both assess the current state of lithospheric modeling and develop use cases.  The long-term tectonics community partnered with EarthScope for the first CIG-EarthScope Institute for Lithospheric Modeling workshop, held in Tempe, Arizona at the EarthScope National Office on the Arizona State University campus February 3-4, 2014.  This working meeting focused on geodynamic modeling of lithosphere dynamics, data integration, and the software tools that facilitate this work.