Climate modelling software hack evening

Climate modelling software is at the core of climate change science and so in the last couple of months I've been researching projects that we can volunteer on. I've found three that we can help out with and you'll be glad to know you won't have to know a single line of Fortran! (the language the actual core modelling software is usually written in).

At this meetup we'll start hacking on these projects. Here's an outline of each of the projects:-

http://www.climateprediction.net/ - "Climateprediction.net is a distributed computing, climate modelling project. We run climate models on people’s home computers to help answer questions about how climate change is affecting our world, now and in the future". Project run by the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. They are interested in us writing a bit of Wordpress code to show information from their BOINC site at http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/server_status.html . They want "a 'traffic light' indicator to show the project health on their front page. Sounds like a pretty simple project that most coders could have a go at.

http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/ParVis.shtml - "is a suite of parallel tools and visualization techniques specifically for analyzing ultra-large climate datasets." Project run by The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the USA which "is a federally funded research and development center devoted to service, research and education in the atmospheric and related sciences." They would like help with "build/packaging our main application, ParNCL. ParNCL has a huge number of dependencies so we wound up offering pre-built binaries on our download page. I'd like help either building from scratch or making it available through more standard package managers for Unix and Mac." Seems like a project most techies could help with, and especially if you have previously done building/packaging of Unix/Mac applications.

http://www2.cesm.ucar.edu/models - "The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states." "CESM is one of the primary models used for IPCC studies, NCAR also has a number of scientists who are coauthors of the reports." Also run by The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the USA. They would like us to help them to develop a GUI interface on top of the (mostly) perl scripts that are used to run all the different parts of their system. What GUI technology we could use hasn't been decided so there may be quite a lot of scope for using different/new technologies to do this, including possibly web based ones like Ruby?

So, a simple piece of Wordpress code, building a package for deployment and a GUI to sit on top a bunch of scripts - quite a range of things to choose from there.

Friends Of The Earth have kindly offered to allow us to host the hack evening in their shared space at their HQ near Oval.

We'll be there from 6pm but if you can't make it until later, just turn up when you can.

Itinerary:-

6:00 - arrive

6:30 - Steve presents details of 3 projects to coders and discuss.

7:00 - We do research/programming work on any of the projects to get them started.

9:00 - Pub