SCEC Award Number 22137 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 Scott Callaghan, Kevin Milner, Edric Pauk, William Savran, Fabio Silva, Mei-Hui Su
SCEC Priorities 4c, 4d, 5d SCEC Groups CS, GM, EFP
Report Due Date 03/15/2023 Date Report Submitted 06/30/2023
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 increases the use of modern software development standards in SCEC’s software development activities. Modernizing SCEC software practices improves the accessibility of our software to the research community and enable other software developers to modify and improve SCEC software in the future. Our project improved SCEC software practices in several areas this year including: (1) Improved our shared software infrastructure, (2) Increased our use of software best practices, and (3) Increased our training and outreach activities.
Intellectual Merit SCEC’s system science research uses a collection of interrelated and interdependent research software that we refer to 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 this 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 this year include OpenSHA, CyberShake, Broadband Platform, pyCSEP, and UCVM. Two new software projects called the GMSV Toolkit and the CyberShake Data Access tool were added to the SCEC software ecosystem. 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: The SCEC software home page provides description of the SCEC maintained software distributions and links to the software source codes and documentation for each.