BUILDING DOMAIN-SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENTS FOR COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE - A CASE-STUDY IN SEISMIC TOMOGRAPHY

We report on our experiences in building a computational environment f or tomographic image analysis for marine seismologists studying the st ructure and evolution of midocean ridge volcanism. The computational e nvironment is determined by an evolving set of requirements for this p roblem domain and includes needs for high performance parallel computi ng, large data analysis, model visualization, and computation interact ion and control. Although these needs are not unique in scientific com puting, the integration of techniques for seismic tomography with tool s for parallel computing and data analysis into a computational enviro nment was (and continues to be) an interesting, important learning exp erience for researchers in both disciplines. For the geologists, the u se of the environment led to fundamental geologic discoveries on the E ast Pacific Rise, the improvement of parallel ray-tracing algorithms, and a better regard for the use of computational steering in aiding mo del convergence. The computer scientists received valuable feedback on the use of programming, analysis, and visualization tools in the envi ronment. In particular, the tools for parallel program data query (DAQ V) and visualization programming (Viz) were demonstrated to be highly adaptable to the problem domain. We discuss the requirements and the c omponents of the environment in detail. Both accomplishments and limit ations of our work are presented.