Abstract
In late March, the Electronic Seismologist sent his favorite cub reporter on his first special assignment to the EarthScope Computational Science and Information Technology Workshop in Snowbird, Utah. EarthScope (http://www.earthscope.org), in case you haven't heard, is a major program under consideration for funding in the U.S. that will examine a good part of the North American continent from all sorts of viewpoints in the coming decade. It clearly will challenge our ability to integrate many different data types into a cohesive view of Earth structure and processes. So with high hopes, notepad in hand, and a pencil in my ear (oop... BEHIND my ear; next time I'll bring a laptop!), I headed to the mountains. I came away with a strong sense of deja vu . There we were, slightly disoriented geoscientists along with some outside agitators from the computer science community gathered together to wallow (or waller, where I come from) in acronym soup and to try to get a grip on a very important problem. Ah... I've got it... the year: 1997; the place: a nameless hotel on the outskirts of Chicago; the event: the IRIS FISSURES Workshop (Malone, 1997); the problem: produce a software framework to aid seismologists in data processing and research. Granted, five years later, there are quite a few differences. Many/most of the acronyms have changed, software frameworks are termed Information Technology, the problem has been expanded to include the whole of the geosciences, and, obviously, the venue is a vast improvement. The constants: simultaneously excited, confused, and concerned geoscientists; similarly stimulated and remarkably patient computer scientists; lack of a common language; and an overwhelming sense that the problem at hand is truly a grand challenge. While at the workshop, I took lots of notes in anticipation of dazzling readers with the latest in …
Published Version
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