Workshop on Petascale Computing and the Geosciences

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This is a planning activity designed to develop understanding of the activities needed to prepare the geoscience research community to exploit NSF's strategic plan to develop a petascale computing environment for science and engineering. It will bring together participants from computer science, space physics, ocean science, atmospheric science, and Earth science in a pair of small workshops intended to jump-start the process of developing next-generation geoscience research codes that perform well on petascale systems. The long-term intent is to better position geoscientists to be able to conduct cutting-edge research with petascale systems when these are deployed. The first workshop will assess the viability of a representative sample of current, geoscience, high-end, computational models, analyze the performance and structure of existing algorithms, and characterize the problems that geoscientists wish to tackle with petascale resources. Appropriate experts will present information about new approaches and tools for performance measurement and code characterization, performance modeling, and program development. An intended outcome will be the identification of some ideas for early collaborations or pilot studies aimed at using some of these modern tools to study and improve significant geoscience research applications. These collaborations will be pursued for roughly six months after the first workshop. Results and lessons learned will be reported at the second workshop. A publicly available report of the process will be written and it is anticipated that this will help the broader community plan the steps needed to prepare computational geoscience for the use of petascale computing systems. It is anticipated that this activity will seed future advances in the capabilities of geoscience modeling, with applications beyond geoscience research to other areas in which geoscience computational codes are used, such as weather and seasonal climate forecasting, coastal inundation simulation, earthquake hazards, and space weather.