Special Session on:
Transforming Water Resource Management with Open-Source Community Tools

Conveners:

David Moulton, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Ian Gorton, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Description:

Open-source community frameworks and tools are playing a key role in addressing the demand for modeling and simulation to have a positive impact on water resource management and protection, and environmental management in general. These projects offer greater transparency and standardization for regulators, policy makers, and the general public, than their proprietary counterparts. In addition, these projects are actively establishing interdisciplinary communities that can accelerate development and the deployment of these tools to bring advanced computational resources to bear on these multi-faceted problems. One such new program is the Advanced Simulation Capability for Environmental Management (ASCEM), which is developing state-of-the-art modeling capabilities for understanding contaminant fate and transport in natural and engineered systems. ASCEM is being developed by a consortium of national laboratories, and is supported by the Office of Environmental Management in the Department of Energy (DOE-EM). ASCEM will provide a modular and extensible open-source set of tools that will enable a graded approach to standardized assessments of performance and risk for DOE-EM cleanup and closure decisions at its legacy waste sites. Specifically, it will provide extensive capabilities for data management, rigorous data provenance, and conceptual model development, and a collection of integrated toolsets named Akuna that support uncertainty quantification, parameter estimation, risk analysis, and decision support. ASCEM is also developing a flexible high performance computing simulator named Amanzi, which is designed to leverage the growing parallelism in modern systems, from laptops to supercomputers. Amanzi will be open source and extensible, and serve as a community model for subsurface simulators. All tool developments leverage investments and expertise from a wide variety of existing programs throughout the DOE.

In this session, members of the ASCEM project will describe the design and implementation of several key toolsets, including Akuna and Amanzi, and present recent results highlighting the capabilities of the project. We also seek contributions from the community that describe other open source efforts that are aimed at developing community codes, frameworks and tools for subsurface modeling. Areas of interest include parallel meshing frameworks, frameworks for uncertainty quantification and parameter estimation, data management and provenance, visualization and user interfaces. In addition, we are interested in tools and approaches that are being use to ensure the community codes are relevant and of high quality, such as community data resources and community benchmark suites.