Corinna Schrum
Professor for Oceanography Geophysical Institute Allégaten 70 NO-5007 Bergen corinna.schrum@gfi.uib.no Tel: 0047 91 51 87 21
-] What application will you create (or enhance) as part of the project (what does it do)
It simulates the ocean physical dynamics and the marine ecosystem, from physics to fish. We are particularly focused on the oceans response on climate time scales, hence performance is an issue.
-] Who will use the application (how large is the audience, what areas.
Its an application in the research community, growing audience. The modeling tool will be used by a number of core scientists O(≈10, growing numbers, the tool will be used in education too). The model results will be used in a wider marine research community.
. will it be used by end users in the community, or people inside a company using it as a tool, or for advancing science..)
Its a tool for advancing science and in principle open source. So far end users use only the data bases generated, since the tool is difficult to use. However, with proper interface, this could be changed.
-] What are the computation needs that will benefit from parallel computation
Not sure that a understand the question,but the numerical simulations cover large ocean areas and long time scales, so they are computational intensive.
-] What has blocked you from using parallel computation up to this point
We use some parallelisation, but it is sub-optimal and we have not been strongly involved in developing the code, so using the parallelized code is challenging and we are under-using it.
-] How will your application provide higher benefit as a result of the parallel computation (what currently can't be done that will be enabled, or what aspect will be improved. For example, will weeks of waiting for simulation results drop to hours? Will a researcher be able to interactively search, rather than doing a scatter shot of simulations and hoping one of them was the right one? Will a product be producible with less material or less design effort? Will the graphics be richer, or render faster, or use less battery?)
Waiting times will be reduced, allow for higher resolution in space and processes. The simulation data can be produced computationally more effective and costs can be reduced.
-] Who will receive this benefit and how (for example, will the application help cure cancer for millions of EU citizens by enabling doctors to use personalized genetics?)
I´m not sure if we can offer something like that, but our applications can enable better improved management of marine systems and support decision making.
And, for logistics of the project, we would like to start by coding in C/C++ but are open to integrating into other languages, such as Python, Java, or even Javascript. Could you say a bit about your development process:
We use Fortran, this is the language that is be used in climate modeling, weather forcating and ocean dynamics. This is the standard language for model developer in my field. We use Matlab (or better Python for post processing, Java and Javascripting would be great when thinking about further developing into interactibce processing-
-] What language(s) do you plan to use for the application
see above.
-] Is the application.. desktop based, Cloud (SAAS) based, browser based, or mobile
We run it on multple platforms, typically using LINUX or UNIX, but other systems are possible too. We use fortran source code, which can be transferred easily.
-] A little bit about the architecture (do you have a server with database, or a large data set that is churned through such as Big Data style, what parts of the computation are performed on the end-user device versus in a server, and so on)
We have input and forcing data which we typically pre-process and organize to run the application. We produce large data output, which is yet sequentially written and post processing is typically offline and not interactive.
Best regards, Corinna