The Role of Scientific Communities in Creating Reusable Software: Lessons From Geophysics

The domain of geophysics has historically been a driver of scientific software development due to the size, complexity, and societal importance of the research questions. Geophysical computation complements field observation, laboratory analysis, experiment, and theory. Specialized scientific software is regularly developed by geophysicists in collaboration with computational scientists and applied mathematicians; in this cross-disciplinary environment, reusability is critically important both to preserve the intellectual investment and to ensure the quality of the research and its replicability. The Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG) is a “community of practice” that advances Earth science by developing and disseminating software for geophysics and related fields. We discuss CIG's best practices, lessons learned, and community practices, and highlight how development of high-quality, reusable scientific software has accelerated scientific discovery by enabling simulations of the dynamics of Earth's surface and interior across a wide spectrum of problems using resources from laptops to leadership-class supercomputers.