Improving the Sustainability of SCEC Scientific Software using Software Best Practices

Philip J. Maechling, Scott Callaghan, Kevin R. Milner, Edric Pauk, William H. Savran, Fabio Silva, & Mei-Hui Su

Published September 11, 2022, SCEC Contribution #12576, 2022 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #123 (PDF)

Poster Image: 
SCEC’s earthquake system science program uses scientific software to translate interdisciplinary research advances into predictive models of earthquake processes and to deliver broad impact seismic hazard information to the research community and the public. SCEC uses a collection of inter-related and inter-dependent scientific software in our system science research. Here, we describe the SCEC software sustainability project which applies modern software development standards and best practices to SCEC software so that it can be more easily and widely used by the SCEC research community and so that it can be modified and extended by software developers in the future. This year, our work focused on the following SCEC developed software distributions: SCEC Broadband Platform (BBP), CyberShake, OpenSHA, pyCSEP, and the Unified Community Velocity Model (UCVM). These software distributions are now hosted as open-source software distributions in public GitHub repositories, available to the community for research use. We describe improvements made to these SCEC software distributions that include improved organization of the source code repositories, improved build and distribution methods, introduction of continuous integration testing methods, improved documentation, standardized open-source licensing, and the development of citable publications. These software improvements are highlighted on newly created SCEC software landing pages on the SCEC.org website, providing simple introductions and quick links to repositories and documentation.

Key Words
Ground Motions, Seismic Hazards, Community Models, Earthquake Forecasting, Software

Citation
Maechling, P. J., Callaghan, S., Milner, K. R., Pauk, E., Savran, W. H., Silva, F., & Su, M. (2022, 09). Improving the Sustainability of SCEC Scientific Software using Software Best Practices. Poster Presentation at 2022 SCEC Annual Meeting.


Related Projects & Working Groups
Computational Science (CS)