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Summary. In 2001, the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) organized a cross-disciplinary collaboration among computer scientists and geoscientists to develop a new cyberinfrastructure (CI) for earthquake system science, the SCEC Community Modeling Environment (CME). The CME Project has had a substantial impact on CI workforce development. Teams comprising both computer scientists and geoscientists have constructed an interconnected set of "computational platforms" capable of managing the large databases and calculations required for earthquake system science. SCEC has also established a highly successful undergraduate intern program, Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology (USEIT), to recruit a more diverse generation of researchers and give them hands-on experience with team-based, cross-disciplinary science. This interdisciplinary structure has provided exceptional opportunities for the cross-training of early-career scientists; 29 graduate students and 7 postdocs at a variety of participating institutions have thus far been supported by the CME Project, and 79 undergraduates from 31 colleges and universities have participated in USEIT. USEIT has primed the pipeline by attracting substantial, diverse fraction of these undergraduates into considering careers in CI research.

Our USEIT and CME experience has identified a "weak link" in CI-related career pathways: the transition from discipline-oriented undergraduate degree programs to problem-oriented graduate studies in earthquake system science. We propose to address this educational linkage problem through a CI-TEAM implementation project entitled the Advancement of Cyberinfrastructure Careers through Earthquake System Science (ACCESS). The objective of the ACCESS project is to provide a diverse group of students with research experiences in earthquake system science that will advance their careers and encourage their creative participation in cyberinfrastructure (CI) development. Its overarching goal is to prepare a diverse, CI-savvy workforce for solving the fundamental problems of system science. Three programmatic elements will be developed to achieve this goal: (1) Undergraduate (ACCESS-U) Internships, which will support CI-related research in the SCEC Collaboratory by undergraduate students working toward senior theses or other research enhancements of the bachelor's degree. (2) Graduate (ACCESS-G) Internships, which will support up to one year of CI-related research in the SCEC Collaboratory by graduate students working toward a master's thesis. (3) The ACCESS Forum, a new working group managed under the SCEC Communication, Education & Outreach program to promote CI careers in earthquake system science.

The ACCESS internships will be granted to students through a competitive process, and the candidates will include (though not be restricted to) students who have gained experience in earthquake system science through the USEIT program. ACCESS will encourage women and students from under-represented and disadvantaged groups to achieve advanced degrees through CI-related research, and it will guide them toward faculty positions in research universities. The project will heavily leverage our NSF-sponsored activities, including the USEIT program and the CME computational platforms. ACCESS will be scaled to a national level through the SCEC base program, which is jointly funded by NSF and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and comprises more than 55 universities and research organizations.

Intellectual Merit. Earthquake system science concerns the dynamics of fault systems, fault ruptures, and seismic wave propagation. These system-level problems are coupled to one another through the complex and generally nonlinear processes of brittle and ductile deformation. ACCESS will pave the route to better earthquake forecasts and better estimates of strong ground motions by implementing the CI for physics-based seismic hazard analysis.

Broader Impacts. ACCESS will enhance the workforce capable of migrating basic research into the practical applications of geosystem science. It will benefit the USGS and other federal agencies that participate in the National Hazard Reduction Program. Earthquake system science has much in common with the study of Earth's climate and other natural systems. ACCESS will develop the CI-savvy workforce needed to explore this type of model-based research in a petascale computing environment, which will benefit system science in general. In particular, it will promote the vertical integration of CI in parallel with petascale hardware development, thus supporting NSF's plans to achieve petascale computing by 2010.