Geon Grid Newsletter

PARDEE SYMPOSIUM: “GEOINFORMATICS AND THE ROLE OF CYBERINFRASTURCE IN GEOSCIENCS RESEARCH”

This session will consist of presentations on Geoinformatics and the use of advanced information technology in support of research in the geosciences. The talks are intended to provide an overview of the emerging cyberinfrastructure initiative and its benefit to the geosciences. A series of lectures will be presented by leading geoscientists and computer scientists in this area and will highlight current community activities related to the integration of the geosciences with state-of-the-art information research. Session organizers are Randy Keller (UTEP), Lee Allison (Kansas Geological Survey), and Chaitan Baru (SDSC).

TOPICAL POSTER SESSION: “Geoinformatics and Geological Sciences: The Next Step”

This session will present results of geoinformatics projects in the geoscience community, in particular efforts that are making use of the merging or integration of data and/or computational resources that are distributed across different sites and disciplines. Exploration of areas where information technology developments can most effectively address current geoscience problems. Session organizers are Ramon Arrowsmith (ASU) and Chuck Meertens (UNAVCO).

The GEON Project presented well-attended papers and demos at three national meetings. The meetings include the Geological Society of America (GSA) annual meeting in Seattle, Washington November 2 - 5; the annual supercomputing meeting SC2003 in Phoenix, Arizona November 15-21; and the Fall American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, December 8 - 12.

Members from the Geo community were brought together for three separate 2-day workshops organized by GEON and held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (UCSD), during February and March 2004.

Randy Keller (UTEP), Bill Glassley (Lawrence Livermore National Lab), and Mark Gahegan (Penn State) each facilitated ontology workshops focusing on Seismology, Aqueous Geochemistry, and Ontology Visualization. In all, approximately 20 Geo and IT scientists came together to discuss and develop ontologies relevant to their area of specialty. These tools will be used in developing the information and data integration capabilities that are integral to the GEON project goals.

More than 30 GEON PIs and team members will come together for a Spring PI meeting, hosted by Krishna Sinha at Virginia Tech on March 22-23, 2004. This science meeting is designed to develop a cohesive plan for geo-ontology research leading to semantic integration of scientific data, as well as provide a forum to develop integrated prototypes of science topics that will demonstrate GEON's proof of concept.

Dogan Seber was elected as the Chair of the DLESE (Digital Library for Earth System Education) Steering Committee at the March 2004 meeting in Boulder, Colorado. DLESE is a community effort involving educators, students, and scientists working together to improve the quality, quantity, and efficiency of teaching and learning about the Earth system at all levels.

The DLESE Steering Committee guides DLESE's growth and progress, and is engaged in a process of examining and recommending how best to structure governance and community volunteerism for an expanded DLESE. www.dlese.org

GEON has recently purchased 16 computers to become part of the GEONgrid network. These machines are currently being installed and deployed at each GEON site. Domain scientists will begin populating the GEONgrid with data and applications in the near future.

GEON has been awarded 30,000 cpu hours of computation time by TeraGrid for experimental High Performance Computation (HPC) applications. GEON researchers will be using TeraGrid compute resources to model and simulate 3D earthquake seismic waveform records using realistic geologic models and to study lithospheric deformation using 3D finite element calculations. These resources will then be made available to the community via the GEONgrid portal.