On Software Infrastructure for Computational Earth Sciences

Simulation software are build with three layers: the user interface, the mathematical models and the numerical methods. The mathematical layer provides abstraction from the numerical techniques and their implementation, the user interface provides abstraction from mathematical models. Each of the layer has a particular terminology being used, requires special skills fro the user to work within this layer and consequently needs particular computational tools. Appropriate tools for implementing numerical techniques is C/C++, for programming mathematical models is a scripting language such as python and for user interfaces are input files and graphical user interfaces. In this talk we will present the concepts of the mathematical modelling language escript and will show how escript is linked downwards into numerical numerical and upwards into user interfaces.