Building Sustainable Software - The CSDMS Approach

csdms, The Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System, is an NSF funded project whose focus is to aid a diverse community of earth and ocean system model users and developers to use and create robust software quickly. To this end, csdms develops, integrates, archives and disseminates earth-system models and tools to an international (67 country) community with the goal of building the set of tools necessary to model the earth system. Modelers use csdms for access to hundreds of open source surface-dynamics models and tools, as well as model metadata. Such a model repository increases model transparency and helps eliminate duplication by presenting the current state of modeling efforts. To increase software sustainability, composability and interoperability, csdms promotes standards that define common modeling interfaces, semantic mediation between models, and model metadata. Through online resources and workshops, csdms promotes software engineering best practices, which are unfamiliar to many developers within our modeling community. For example, version control, unit testing, continuous integration, test-driven development, and well-written clean code are all topics of the educational mission of csdms. 1. The Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System The mission of the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (csdms) [8] is to help a diverse modeling community toward common goals and standards. This effort involves creating: • a repository of source code and metadata for open-source models and tools (Section 2) • reusable plug-and-play model components and a framework within which they can be coupled to create new models (Section 3) • an efficient and open modeling community through standards (Section 3.1) and education (Section 4) In building a modeling framework, csdms has leveraged several existing, well-established and open-source software tools. For example, csdms uses tools from the Common Component Architecture (CCA) [1] toolchain: Babel, and Bocca. Babel provides interoperability between components written in different languages; it currently supports C, C++, Fortran, Java, and Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System, University of Colorado.