IN31C-1776
VERCE: a productive e-Infrastructure and e-Science environment for data-intensive seismology research

Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Jean-Pierre Vilotte1, Malcolm Atkinson2, Alessandro Spinuso3, Andreas Rietbrock4, Alberto Michelini5, Heiner Igel6, Anton Frank7, Michele Carpené8, Horst Schwichtenberg9, Emanuele Casarotti5, Rosa Filgueira2, Thomas Garth4, André Germünd9, Iraklis Klampanos2, Amy Krause2, Lion Krischer6, Siew Hoon Leong10, Federica Magnoni5, Jonas Matser3 and Genevieve Moguilny11, (1)Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Paris, France, (2)University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, (3)Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, Netherlands, (4)University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom, (5)National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Rome, Italy, (6)Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Munich, Germany, (7)Leibniz Supercomputer Centre, Garching, Germany, (8)CINECA, Supercomputing applications and innovation department, Bologna, Italy, (9)Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI), Sankt Augustin, Germany, (10)Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching, Germany, (11)Organization Not Listed, Paris, France
Abstract:
Seismology addresses both fundamental problems in understanding the Earth’s internal wave sources and structures and augmented societal applications, like earthquake and tsunami hazard assessment and risk mitigation; and puts a premium on open-data accessible by the Federated Digital Seismological Networks. The VERCE project, “Virtual Earthquake and seismology Research Community e-science environment in Europe”, has initiated a virtual research environment to support complex orchestrated workflows combining state-of-art wave simulation codes and data analysis tools on distributed computing and data infrastructures (DCIs) along with multiple sources of observational data and new capabilities to combine simulation results with observational data.

The VERCE Science Gateway provides a view of all the available resources, supporting collaboration with shared data and methods, with data access controls. The mapping to DCIs handles identity management, authority controls, transformations between representations and controls, and access to resources. The framework for computational science that provides simulation codes, like SPECFEM3D, democratizes their use by getting data from multiple sources, managing Earth models and meshes, distilling them as input data, and capturing results with meta-data. The dispel4py data-intensive framework allows for developing data-analysis applications using Python and the ObsPy library, which can be executed on different DCIs. A set of tools allows coupling with seismology and external data services. Provenance driven tools validate results and show relationships between data to facilitate method improvement.

Lessons learned from VERCE training lead us to conclude that solid-Earth scientists could make significant progress by using VERCE e-science environment. VERCE has already contributed to the European Plate Observation System (EPOS), and is part of the EPOS implementation phase. Its cross-disciplinary capabilities are being extended for the EPOS implantation phase.