Choi Receives NSF Funding  

Developing an integrated modeling platform for tectonics, earthquake cycles and surface processes

Dr. Euneso Choi, associate professor in the Center for Earthquake Research and Information (CERI), was recently awarded $443,830 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project “Elements: Developing an integrated modeling platform for tectonics, earthquake cycles and surface processes.” Via this project, Choi aims to develop a user-friendly and sustainable code that can simulate lithospheric deformations coupled with landscape evolution and earthquake cycles.

One of the greatest challenges facing the Earth Sciences community is how to link what occurred over geological time scales of thousands to millions of years to what occurs on human time scales. Natural hazards such as earthquakes, floods, landslides and volcanoes sit right at the intersections of geological and human time scales. Capability to simulate the interactions among diverse geological processes provides a baseline to study how global changes are perturbing these processes on human time scales. The goal of the project is aligned with the on-going research trend in Earth Sciences to view earthquake cycles and landscape evolutions as a system coupled with long-term lithospheric deformation. Multiple research communities, including geomorphology, structural geology and earthquake physics, are expected to benefit from the new modeling capability this project enables.

The product software extends an existing open-source code, DES3D (Dynamic Earth Solver in 3D). With internal enhancements and scalable performance enabled by the latest parallel computing technology, the product software functions as a reliable integrated modeling platform that can explore interplays between tectonics, surface processes and earthquake cycles. The project includes many measures to improve user experience with the product code. Web-based input file generation, useful documentation and tutorials readable and executable online will make the product code accessible and easy to use even to the users who are new to tectonic modeling. To facilitate sustained development and maintenance of the product code, modern software engineering practices are adopted including thorough unit and regression tests. A container-based technology is built into the product code to produce reproducible packages of a model without user intervention. To ensure that the product code be a valuable addition to the existing cyberinfrastructure, this project will actively borrow expertise of the collaborators who have developed cyberinfrastructure or have conducted related research. The project's deliverables and delivery mechanisms are assessed for success based on diverse quantitative metrics.

For more information on this project, contact Choi at echoi2@memphis.edu.