The SCEC Community Modeling Environment: An Information Infrastructure for System-level Earthquake Science

Abstract

In the July/August issue of SRL , Tom Owens, writing his first column for the Electronic Seismologist (ES), asked “The Question”: Can we as a community develop the long-term relationships with the computer science community, the financial resources, and the culture necessary to build and maintain a state-of-the-art information technology (IT) structure that will really make a difference in the way we do our science? He discussed the tough practical challenges posed by The Question and highlighted some of the IT efforts underway by IRIS, EarthScope, and other geoscience organizations. In particular, he mentioned a new IT project by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) that involves an interesting mix of geoscientists and computer scientists. As a follow-up, he invited us to contribute an article to ES on how this project was formulated, how the collaborations have been set up, and how it's going. Tall order, but we'll try! We begin with a little background. In October 2001, SCEC was awarded a five-year, $10 million grant by the NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) Program to develop a Community Modeling Environment (CME)—what IT aficionados would call a “collaboratory”—for system-level earthquake science. In addition to a number of participating SCEC institutions, the project involves IRIS (http://www.iris.edu), the USGS' Pasadena office (http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov), and two major IT research organizations, the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California (http://www.isi.edu) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) of the University of California at San Diego (http://www.sdsc.edu). The overarching goal of the CME project is to improve the information infrastructure for seismic hazard analysis (SHA), which has historically been the major focus of SCEC's research program. SHA seeks to describe the maximum level of shaking that can be expected at a specified site on the Earth's surface due to earthquakes anticipated over a …