[CIG-ALL] CIG Newsletter, September 2010

Mon Sep 13 10:13:56 PDT 2010

Table of contents:

LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR
STAFFING NEWS
POSITION OPENINGS AT CIG
UPCOMING GSA TUTORIAL GALE
HOLD THE DATE: CIG BUSINESS MEETING at AGU
GLADE WORKSHOP
CDM WORKSHOP
GALE 1.5.0 RELEASE AND INSTALLATION ON TERAGRID
DEAL.ii RELEASE 

LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics begins operations at UC Davis

I am pleased to announce that CIG began operations at UC Davis under a new
cooperative agreement from NSF on July 1st, 2010.   The core administrative
and server team is in place, and we have begun recruiting software
engineers. If you know of candidates for these positions (or you would like
to apply for one of the positions), please let us know! The job
descriptions are posted below.

CIG has had a full summer of workshops and release of new versions of
codes. We also have a full schedule ahead. The Science Steering Committee
is reviewing the development priorities for the upcoming year, and we
welcome comments and suggestions from you, the CIG community.  We will hold
an upcoming election for vacancies on the Executive Committee and Science
Steering Committee.  In December, we will hold our Annual Business Meeting.
We have made subcontracts to University of Chicago (for continued
development of PyLith), and to Texas A&M (for continued development of
deal.ii and the magma suite).  Walter Landry at Caltech continues his work
on GALE and other projects. 

If you would like to contact me, or any member of the EC or SSC, you can
view our contact information at:

http://www.geodynamics.org/cig/community/governance

CIG is a community driven organization – we are nothing without your
participation. 

Louise Kellogg, Director, CIG.

STAFFING NEWS
Bill Broadley is a network/cluster manager at University of California,
Davis, and has been managing the transition to Davis, and reestablishing
the SVN and buildbots. 
Walter Landry of Caltech is also working on the transition, as well as
continuing to develop GALE and give tutorial sessions. 
Braden Pellett is the website developer and mailing list manager for CIG at
Davis. He has been assisting CIG in revamping the design and ease of the
geodynamics.org website. 
Ariel Shoresh once again is the administrator of the CIG project, and is
the main point of contact for all things administrative, from subawards to
workshops. 

POSITION OPENINGS AT CIG

We currently are looking for our Lead Software Engineer. This person will
be responsible for providing high-level technical direction for CIG, as
well as management/oversight of CIG software engineers.  They will assist
in strategic technology planning along with the Science Steering Committee
of CIG, and the Director. They will also be working closely with community
geophysicists to identify and implement improved algorithms by discussing
research needs and then writing new code based on their feedback. The lead
software engineer will also participate in software training sessions in
new codes for both scientists and graduates/post-docs, with varied levels
of programming familiarity. 

Full details and requirements can be found at the following UCD Human
Resources

https://www.employment.ucdavis.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/frameset/Frameset.jsp?time=1282059679229

If you, or someone you know, might be interested in the position, please
apply!

UC Davis is an equal opportunity employer.

UPCOMING TUTORIAL GALE AT THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA MEETING

Training Session for the Gale Computational Software in Tectonics and
Geophysics, to be held Saturday, Oct 30, 2010, Colorado Convention Center,
Denver, CO (before the 2010 GSA Annual Meeting). In this training session,
CIG will focus on training new users in the use of the tectonics modeling
software Gale, a 2D/3D parallel code that solves problems in orogenesis,
rifting, and subduction with a variety of boundary conditions, including
free surfaces and coupling to surface erosion models. Get more details at
2010 GSA Annual Meeting. 

http://www.geosociety.org/meetings/2010/

HOLD THE DATE: CIG BUSINESS MEETING at AGU

We will be holding our Annual Business Meeting on Monday, December 13th, at
the Parc 55, during the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco. We’ll be
discussing the now complete transition and getting community input on
future goals and priorities for CIG over the next year. We hope to see you
there! We will send out more information the closer we get to the date.

GLADE WORKSHOP

Geodynamicists convened July 26-29, 2010 at the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in La Jolla, California for the Geodynamics of the Lithosphere
and Deep Earth (GLADE) meeting. GLADE was co-sponsored by CIG and NSF with
90 participants from all over the world and from complementary disciplines,
including computational geodynamics, tectonics, marine geophysics, and
seismology.  The 3-day science program stimulated discussion with extended
poster sessions, punctuated by 6 keynote lectures each day.  More than half
the participants were graduate students (33), postdocs, or other early
career scientists  (20). The technical program on the fourth day consisted
of hands-on tutorials for next-generation geodynamics software including
GALE and SNAC as well as a CIG session on emerging numerical methodologies.

A townhall discussion was led by members of the Science Steering Committee,
Wolfgang Bangerth and Magali Billen to gather input from the community
regarding present and future software development priorities. A summary of
the discussion at the GLADE townhall is available at the following link;
comments are welcome. 

http://www.geodynamics.org/cig/community/documents/glade2010townhall

Overall, there was a great chemistry amongst GLADE participants who left
the meeting with a new (or renewed) sense of community and enthusiastic
support to attend another GLADE meeting in the future. 

CDM WORKSHOP
The Crustal Deformation Modeling workshop was held June 14-18, 2010, in
Golden, Colorado on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines, with 68
participants. The first two days were spent on tutorials for the various
code packages, with Monday serving beginning users, and
intermediate/advanced tutorials being held on Tuesday.  The last three days
consisted of talks about the recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and Baja
California, as well as presentations on numerical and modeling methods.  

These presentations can be found at this link, and are downloadable as PDF
files. (No animations).
http://www.geodynamics.org/cig/community/workinggroups/short/workshops/cdm-10/agenda

If you attended the CDM workshop, and you haven’t yet responded to the
post-workshop survey, please do so, as we need feedback on the
status/location of next year’s workshop.
http://www.geodynamics.org/cig/community/workinggroups/short/workshops/cdm-10/cdm10-postwk-survey

GALE 1.5.0 RELEASE AND INSTALLATION ON TERAGRID
Gale 1.5.0 was released on July 27, 2010. GALE is an implicit finite
element code for the long-term tectonics community.  This release features
check-pointing, deformed lower boundaries, multi-grid, and a robust
yielding rheology. 

You can download binaries or the source code from:

http://geodynamics.org/cig/software/gale/

Gale 1.5.0 is also available on TACC's Lonestar.  For instructions on how
to use Gale on Lonestar and information about CIG’s TACC allocation, see

 http://geodynamics.org/cig/software/csa/instructions/tacc/

DEAL.ii RELEASE 

Version 6.3.1 was released on July 18, 2010. This release addresses a
number of problems in release 6.3.0 related to compatibility with certain
compilers, operating systems, and versions of external libraries. A list of
changes between versions 6.3.0 and 6.3.1 can be found at 

http://www.dealii.org/developer/doxygen/deal.II/changes_between_6_3_0_and_6_3_1.html