Championing Software Best Practices and Discoverability at CIG

Lorraine Hwang, & Rene Gassmoeller

Published September 10, 2023, SCEC Contribution #13209, 2023 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #214 (PDF)

The Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics was established in 2005 as a partnership between computational and solid-Earth science to advance computational modeling in geodynamics. Our approach includes supporting the development of open source software built on established numerical libraries to reduce the duplication in effort in developing software and to improve its quality and resilience. Models such as PyLith, ASPECT, Rayleigh, SPECFEM enable frontier research in short-term crustal deformation, the Earth’s mantle and lithosphere, stellar and planetary dynamics, and wave propagation.

Currently, software accepted as part of our community are required to meet CIG community software best practices (geodynamics.org/software/software-bp) that are adapted from computational science and software engineering. All codes must meet our Minimum best practices which includes open source licensing, version control, portable build systems, testing, PID, and a citable publication. CIG supported community codes must meet our Standard best practices and work towards meeting Target best practices. Many of these best practices are implemented in an example repository provided as a template on GitHub.

CIG currently reviews software internally in verifying whether it meets these criteria. However, the recognition of the need for credit for software and reproducibility of research has driven the establishment of software journals. Journals may cover multiple disciplines and may have differing standards. CIG is exploring pathways to increase the discoverability of quality software that has undergone outside peer review to be included within our code community. Codes in our community have hosted landing pages on our website and access to limited computational resources for notebooks and containers. Landing pages provide additional information for your community of users and metrics for your project. For projects interested in building a community, we can provide expert guidance for your project and support for outreach.

CIG uses Zenodo for long-term preservation (zenodo.org/communities/geodynamics). Developers and researchers of domain relevant research products can associate their deposit with the geodynamics community by selecting our community in the Communities section which directly follows file imports when uploading or editing a deposit.

Interested in having your software be discovered through the CIG code community? Contact us at: geodynamics.org

Key Words
best practices, software, cig

Citation
Hwang, L., & Gassmoeller, R. (2023, 09). Championing Software Best Practices and Discoverability at CIG. Poster Presentation at 2023 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Computational Science (CS)