The Orfeus Java Workshop: Distributed Computing in Earthquake Seismology

Abstract

Back in May 1997 the Electronic Seismologist (ES) attended a workshop with all sorts of seismo-computer geeks and nerds discussing the future direction of seismological software development. A rambling report on this workshop (“The Electronic Seismologist goes to FISSURES”, Malone, Seism. Res. Lett. 68 (4), 1997) concluded that a new approach to future software projects was needed, one which would better encourage writing sharable, reusable, modular code which would be “future proofed” against changes in hardware, data types, presentation techniques, and a host of other moving targets. At the time the ES had some concerns about seismologists “flocking to a computer science-y solution requiring a significant investment in learning something this new.” Indeed, three years later the FISSURES project is a quiet backwater effort with only a few people following up and with limited support by IRIS. Polite inquiry and Web surfing by the ES turned up few examples of possible descendants of that workshop, at least in the U.S. Surprisingly enough, aspects of the FISSURES effort appear to be thriving in Europe. In particular, key aspects of the FISSURES concepts are represented in both the style and content of applications written in Java. java is being used for seismological tool development at several places in Europe (and a few in the U.S. also). A recent workshop in Europe emphasized just how much work has been done and that there may be a real future to this new way of doing software development. Even though a previous ES column was devoted to using Java in seismology (Winchester and Crotwell, 1999) the ES has not himself broken out of the old habits to learn this new stuff. With neither knowledge to contribute nor any other good excuse to attend this workshop the ES was still interested in what took place and …