NSF Org:	EAR Division Of Earth Sciences
Recipient:	CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Initial Amendment Date:	January 23, 2004
Latest Amendment Date:	January 23, 2004
Award Number:	0406751
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	Robin Reichlin EAR  Division Of Earth Sciences GEO  Directorate for Geosciences
Start Date:	February 1, 2004
End Date:	January 31, 2005 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount:	$25,000.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date:	$25,000.00
Funds Obligated to Date:	FY 2004 = $25,000.00
History of Investigator:	Michael Gurnis (Principal Investigator) gurnis@caltech.edu Louise Kellogg (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office:	California Institute of Technology 1200 E CALIFORNIA BLVD PASADENA CA  US  91125-0001 (626)395-6219
Sponsor Congressional District:	28
Primary Place of Performance:	California Institute of Technology 1200 E CALIFORNIA BLVD PASADENA CA  US  91125-0001
Primary Place of Performance Congressional District:	28
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI):	U2JMKHNS5TG4
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s):	Geophysics, GEOINFORMATICS
Primary Program Source:	app-0104
Program Reference Code(s):	0000, OTHR
Program Element Code(s):	157400, 725500
Award Agency Code:	4900
Fund Agency Code:	4900
Assistance Listing Number(s):	47.050

ABSTRACT

In order to overcome deficiencies in geodynamics software, the geophysics
community has been formulating a plan for Computational Infrastructure for
Geodynamics (CIG), whose purpose will be to leverage the current state of the art in
scientific computing into a suite of toolkits and codes that serve the greater geodynamics
community from pure modelers to users of existing models. The emphasis is on
developing toolkits that ease model development and foster the interchange of ideas and
algorithms. If successful, this effort promises to revolutionize the way our community
computes by providing tools and services that allow us to focus more on the science and
less on the science-neutral parts of high-performance computation. The goal is to
empower a larger community of students, researchers, educators with the tools for
quantitative hypothesis testing.

In order to continue to broaden participation from the geophysics community as the
vision for and structure of CIG are finalized and the proposal to fund it are prepared, we
propose to hold a workshop, open to the entire community January 16-17, 2004. By
holding the workshop at this time we are hoping to strike a balance between our desire to
maintain momentum in the CIG initiative with the need for continued engagement with
the community. Our objective is for participants to expend as little time as possible
traveling to the workshop venue. It is for this reason that we propose to hold the two-day
workshop in a hotel with appropriate conference facilities immediately adjacent to the
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Our hope is to have about 50 scientists at the
workshop with the majority of the participants spread through the computational
geodynamics community in such a way that we maintain balance between the various sub
disciplines as well as between junior and senior scientists. In addition, we also plan to
invite members of the computer science and computational science communities who we
hope to engage in our planning. Their participation will allow the geophysics participants
to better understand how they can take advantage of advances in information technology
and computational science.

Broader Impacts: The broader impacts of this workshop are likely to be substantial. We
believe that this workshop will allow the geophysics community to come together in a
final push to advance CIG. CIG will likely alter geophysics by strengthening the
infrastructure available to all researchers. CIG will also substantially alter the way
graduate students in computational geophysics are trained in the US.

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