Over the past 2 months we have compiled a survey of the some of the space researchers’ models from the space science modeling group at the University of Alberta. During that time we’ve learned a lot about space physics and the Earth’s magnetosphere in general. We’ve also learned a lot about the models the researchers have been developing in order to better understand and make predictions about space weather.
While talking to the researchers we quizzed them on the nuts and bolts of the software that makes their models tick. Some of the aspects we learned about are:
- What the researchers are modeling
- What operating system their simulations run on (e.g. Linux, Windows, Mac, etc.)
- What programming language the model is written in
- What applications/libraries they use in addition to the code they write
- How many lines of code they have written for their model
- How long it takes for their simulation to run
- Where their simulations run (e.g. WestGrid, a desktop PC, etc.)
- How many people outside of their department are interested in running their model
- How long the model has been in development
- Whether or not their code is under source control
- What the input/output of their model is going to be
- And, of course, many many notes on what the model does and how it does it
Now that we have a better understanding of the models, we’ve selected one regarding magneto-seismology to be the first model we are going to put in the cloud. With that in mind we’ve laid out the CESWP Usage Map, which is a roadmap of how we envision a researcher will develop, stage and deploy a model and how an interested party may run it and use the output. Our next step is to build a prototype web application that handles the stage, deploy and run processes.
ceswp
Hi……the space physics group link above would better be referenced as the “space science modelling group” with the URL pointed to http://www.fdam.ca
Done!