Facility: Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics

This award supports continued operations of the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG) facility to build and sustain essential cyberinfrastructure and computational capacity for geodynamics and seismology. Since 2005, CIG has developed and disseminated widely used, open-source software for research and education in computational seismology, mantle convection, magma dynamics, short- and long-term lithospheric deformation, and geodynamo modeling.

CIG continues to shape the culture of computational geophysics research by improving scientific software development practices and by advancing the education of hundreds of geodynamicists. CIG’s approach toward scientific software development and dissemination has become indispensable to geodynamics and related scientific communities and includes established and sustained deep ties to computational sciences.

Scientific computation is integral to solid Earth geosciences, allowing us to understand and quantify the processes that not only shape but also influence the habitability of the Earth. Computational models provide an essential link between observations and quantitative models describing the evolution and connections between the Earth's interior and surface, as well as relationships between solid Earth processes and atmospheric changes. CIG models also inform applications to geohazards, natural resources, and national security.

CIG continues to enable frontier research in geodynamics by supporting sustainable software development, cyberinfrastructure, and human resources. Guided by collaborative community governance, CIG focuses on 4 cornerstones: 1) Modeling software: Providing powerful software to solve computational models, motivated by important science questions, and built on best practices in open source software and scientific computing; (2) Computational workflows: supporting workflows that facilitate the set-up, execution, analysis, and exchange of complex computational models; (3) Training: Enabling a well-educated, well-trained, and diverse workforce that can effectively use and extend computational models for reproducible discovery and reuse, and that can fully exploit high-performance computing resources; and (4) Community: Building and sustaining a diverse and sustainable community of disciplinary and interdisciplinary researchers working together on challenging geoscience and software problems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.