Building Domain-Specific Environments for Computational Science: a Case Study in Seismic Tomography

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Abstract
We report on our experiences in building a computational environment for tomographic image analysis for marine seismologists studying the structure and evolution of mid- ocean ridge volcanism. The computational environment is determined by an evolving set of requirements for this problem domain and includes needs for high performance parallel computing, large data analysis, model visualiza tion, and computation interaction and control. Although these needs are not unique in scientific computing, the integration of techniques for seismic tomography with tools for parallel computing and data analysis into a com putational environment was (and continues to be) an interesting, important learning experience for researchers in both disciplines. For the geologists, the use of the environment led to fundamental geologic discoveries on the East Pacific Rise, the improvement of parallel ray-trac ing algorithms, and a better regard for the use of compu tational steering in aiding model convergence. The com puter scientists received valuable feedback on the use of programming, analysis, and visualization tools in the en vironment. In particular, the tools for parallel program data query (DAQV) and visualization programming (Viz) were demonstrated to be highly adaptable to the problem do main. We discuss the requirements and the components of the environment in detail. Both accomplishments and limitations of our work are presented.