[CIG-ALL] CIG Newsletter - August 2011 - AGU, GSA and more!

[Ariel Shoresh]

***CIG at the AGU FALL MEETING***
 
 
Please note we will be holding the CIG Business Meeting on Tuesday,
December 6th, 2011 at the Parc 55 hotel (Market Street Room, 3rd floor). 
As usual, we will open with light passed hors doevers at 6:00 pm, before
commencing with the meeting at 6:30 pm.  We welcome all members of the
Geophysical Community to attend.
 
CIG will also be ramping up its activities at the AGU. We have been invited
by the National Science Foundation to join the NSF Street booth group, and
you can find us at Booth 1127 (off the Howard Street side). We will be
having a video display, so if you have some CIG research you would like to
present – perhaps a demo or visualization – please let us know at
ariel-at-geodynamics.org. We’d love to showcase our codes in real-case
situations.
 
In addition, the following two AGU sessions run by CIG members should be of
particular interest to the Community:

	• IN34 Robust Methods and Software for Multiphysics Simulation
http://sites.agu.org/fallmeeting/scientific-program/session-search/547 
IN34 focuses, in particular, on discretization, solvers and implementation
for multiphysics problems in geosciences.
	• DI02: Advances in Computational Modelling in Geoscience
http://sites.agu.org/fallmeeting/scientific-program/session-search/205 
DI02's focus is on new techniques and applications in large-scale
computational geosciences, and on derivative-based inversion methods.
 

 

***Upcoming Tutorials:***


CIG will be conducting a GALE/Underworld Tutorial Session at the Fall GSA
meeting in Minneapolis, MN. 

 
F G 513. Gale/Underworld Framework Tutorial. 
Sat., 8 Oct., 8 a.m.–5 p.m. 
FREE; includes continental breakfast and lunch. Limit: 50. CEU: 0.9. 
Cosponsor: Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics. 
Louis Moresi, Monash Univ.; Patrice Rey, Univ. of Sydney; Walter Landry,
CIG/Caltech.

Gale/Underworld is an open-source 2-D and 3-D parallel code for modeling
long-term tectonic problems, including orogenesis, rifting, subduction, and
heat flow. Participants will learn to install and run Gale/Underworld. The
tutorial is aimed at researchers who have not previously used
Gale/Underworld. It will cover the code’s capabilities, including the
variety of boundary conditions, constitutive laws, and initial conditions
implemented. Tutorial participants will be introduced to its use on the NSF
TeraGrid, where the code is preinstalled. Gale/Underworld is developed and
supported by the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics, an
NSF-funded membership-governed organization.


Attendees will need to bring laptop computers.


http://www.geosociety.org/meetings/2011/courses.htm


Early registration deadline: 6 September
Registration after 6 September costs an additional $30

You do not need to attend the full meeting -  There is a meeting
nonregistrant fee ($40 by 6 Sept.) to be added to the course enrollment
cost (the CIG tutorial is free, so you would only pay the $40 to GSA). 
More information can be found above.
 

 

***Elections:***

We are soliciting interested candidates for the upcoming vacancies to the
Executive Committee and Science Steering Committees.  If you would like to
recommend a candidate, or put your own name forward, please send your
information to the Nominations Committee, at
nominations-at-geodynamics.org. Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni (Chair),  Bruce
Buffett, Marc Parmentier, members.

The deadline for suggesting candidates is September 7, 2011.

 



***New Staff***

We would like to introduce a new member of the CIG staff, computer
scientist Eric Heien. Eric comes to CIG with a Ph.D. in Computer Science
from Osaka University, a B.S. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and a
background in optimization of parallel computing simulations in biophysical
and geophysical simulations.  

Eric will attend the AGU meeting in December, where he will have a chance
to meet many of you in person.

 

***CODE RELEASES***

The PyLith team is pleased to announce the release of PyLith 1.6.1, a
finite-element code designed to solve dynamic elastic problems and
quasi-static viscoelastic problems in tectonic deformation.  This release
fixes a few bugs in PyLith v1.6.0 and includes small updates to the manual
and examples. We strongly recommend all users of previous PyLith releases
switch to this latest release.    
 
IMPORTANT NOTE:      
Version 1.6.1 imposes stricter requirements on descriptive labels      for
spatial databases and friction models. In previous versions      the
default values (empty strings) were allowed. Users are now      required to
specify these values as empty strings are no longer      allowed. This
results in much better error messages.   You can download the source code
and binaries from      
http://geodynamics.org/cig/software/packages/short/pylith
 


***Portals***

NSF has announced that after 10 years of service to the scientific
community, the TeraGrid project has come to an end. It is succeeded by a
new National Science Foundation program called XSEDE, the Extreme Science
and Engineering Digital Environment. See www.xsede.org for information.
 
CIG has long had an allocation and software installed on TeraGrid
computers. XSEDE has migrated those to its new computers. This transition
should be transparent to users of the CIG Teragrid allocation.
 
We are pleased to announce the availability of the Specfem 3D Globe Web
Portal running on Ranger, the 62,976 core supercomputer at the Texas
Advanced Computing Center. The portal provides automated, on-demand 3D
seismic simulations and returns synthetic seismograms to the user.
It is available at https://geodynamics.org/portals/seismo/

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please send a message to
cig-help at geodynamics.org.
 
 
If you wish to access the Community Software Area Allocation to work
directly with other CIG codes such as Citcom, please fill out an
application at:
http://geodynamics.org/cig/software/portals/csa/allocation-application
 
 
If you are an institution that wishes to join CIG as a Community Member,
please fill out an application at:
http://geodynamics.org/cig/community/institution/institutional-mem-apply

 

***CIG Website:***
 

We are looking for ways to build more connections between members of the
CIG community. One idea we would like feedback on is to have a page of
links (by code) to recent papers, so that others who are interested in CIG
code can view what problems are being tackled, and community members can
publicize their research.  If you would be interested in participating,
please contact me at ariel-at-geodynamics.org.