In 2012, RENCI and several partners received a conceptualization grant from the National Science Foundation, which could lead to the development of a multimillion-dollar Water Science Software Institute (WSSI) led by RENCI and UNC Chapel Hill with partners across the U.S.
Overview
The WSSI hopes to change the ecosystem of university-based research by translating the successful open source and community-powered development processes used by Red Hat into the realm of scientific research. Red Hat’s model, codified in a consulting offering called the Pathway to Open Source Enablement, involves developing open source software through a process that shares beta releases and incremental updates with a large user community. The community provides feedback and contributes improvements to the company’s products, and new versions are periodically released, resulting in software that is continuously improved and expanded through community input and collaboration.
The conceptualization grant will fund two workshops that will bring together scientists and technologists to define the functional requirements of the proposed institute and a community forum that will present the institute concept to the larger water science community and invite their input. The project team will also host a software prototyping event, where participants will learn about and evaluate different methods of producing high-quality scientific software that incorporates feedback from the user community.
The project team has developed a strategic plan and presented to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which could serve as the foundation of a full-fledged Water Science Software Institute.
Project Team
- Stan Ahalt (Principal Investigator)
- Ray Idaszak
- Chris Lenhardt
- Michael Stealey
- Hong Yi
- Karl Gustafson
Partners
- Institute for the Environment, UNC Chapel Hill
- National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), University of California Santa Barbara
- National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), University of Maryland
- National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
- RedHat
Funding
Resources
- RENCI to lead effort to conceptualize NSF-funded Water Science Software Institute
- Water Science Software Institute: An open source engagement process
- Developing Scientific Software through the Open Community Engagement Process
- Open Science for Synthesis Workshop targets early career scientists
- Open Science Codefest 2014
Overview
This project brings together software developers and environmental scientists to develop software that will help in the development and building of Green Infrastructure (GI). GI is environmentally sustainable infrastructural architecture that utilizes vegetation, soils, and natural processes to manage storm water, currently one of the major causes of pollution in urban areas and create healthier urban environments. At the scale of a city or county, green infrastructure refers to the patchwork of natural areas that provides habitat, flood protection, cleaner air, and cleaner water.
The team is identifying and improving software programs which can be used to help overcome barriers to creating green infrastructure, focusing on modeling software like Regional Hydro-ecological Simulation System (RHESSys), a GIS-based modeling framework which simulates how water, carbon and nutrients fluctuate through the environment on a watershed scale.
Partners
- National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- UNC Institute of the Environment
Funding
SESYNC
National Science Foundation
