SCEC Award Number 21080 View PDF
Proposal Category Individual Proposal (Data Gathering and Products)
Proposal Title Improving the Sustainability of SCEC Scientific Software using Software Best Practices
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Philip Maechling University of Southern California
Other Participants Mei-Hui Su, Fabio Silva, Scott Callaghan, William Savran, Kevin Milner, Edric Pauk
SCEC Priorities 4c, 4d, 5d SCEC Groups CS, GM, EEII
Report Due Date 03/15/2022 Date Report Submitted 05/16/2022
Project Abstract
 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 interrelated and interdependent scientific software in this system science research. This SCEC software sustainability project is intended to apply modern software development standards to SCEC software. Modernizing SCEC software will improve accessibility of our software to the research community,and enable other software developers to modify and improve SCEC software in the future. This year’s project focused on the following SCEC developed software distributions: SCEC Broadband Platform (BBP), CyberShake, OpenSHA, pyCSEP, and the Unified Community Velocity Model (UCVM). In this project this year, improvements were made to these SCEC software distributions to help them meet software best-practices as defined by the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG) project and other research software engineering organizations.
Intellectual Merit Modern systems science research often requires a collection of interrelated and interdependent research software such as the SCEC software ecosystem. The software included in this ecosystem is complex research software, capable of use on high-performance computers, written in multiple programming languages. The development, improvement, maintenance, and use of these codes requires highly skilled and multilingual software developers. The software improvements on the project focused on software sustainability improvements. In addition to the sustainability improvements, the software was simultaneously being extended with new features and capabilities, and applied in SCEC’s ongoing research activities.
Broader Impacts The SCEC software distributions improved on this project include OpenSHA, CyberShake, Broadband Platform, pyCSEP, and UCVM. All of the software distributions improved on this project are used in the production of public seismic hazard information including U.S.G.S. national seismic hazard maps, utility company seismic hazard and risk studies, and civil engineering research.
Exemplary Figure Figure 1: SCEC's GitHub homepage provides community access to SCEC's open-source software distributions.
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