Please note this page is essentially as it was when I left CNC in July 2004, Michael

softIAM

The Centre for Novel Computing (CNC) is working with the Tyndall Centre to provide an integrated assessment model for improving the understanding of climate change. This project is funded by the Tyndall Centre and runs from August 2002 until August 2004. Further funding for further work is currently being sought.

Climate Change Background

The Tyndall Centre's Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) will bring together climate models, socio-economic models, models of technological change, policy models, transport models and models of social behaviour and decision making. The Tyndall Centre would like, ultimately, to provide stakeholders (for example, Government ministers) with a simple interface from which they can choose from a variety of future emissions scenarios and a variety of modules to run these scenarios. After a short (run)time, the users will be presented with some information, such as the likelihood of extreme events (floods, droughts) in a user-selected geographical region at some defined point in the future.

Thus society, including the scientific, political and business communities, will gain insights into the future of the global climate and its regional effects and the implications of possible human responses.

Computer Science Background

The CNC will provide a flexible framework which enables different modules, or components, to be connected together using control paths determined by the user. This framework will deploy the required executables, perhaps across several machines or the Grid, and control their execution, collecting the relevant results for displaying to the user.

Each module will require some description, say in XML, to capture its required inputs and possible outputs. Additional XML will describe the connection and control/data flow between modules. Our evolving framework software, written in Java, will then process the XML files and source codes to provide the required executables.

This work is an application and extension of work that members of CNC are undertaking in their General Coupling Framework. More details can be found in Chapter 4 (page 37) of Chris Armstrong's MSc Thesis (compressed postscript format).

New: A paper accepted by Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience discusses the GCF (general coupling framework) concept and our Java-based BFG (bespoke framework generator) implementation and is available as a postscript download. When I left CNC, Chris Armstrong had just developed a XSLT-based BFG. More information, and software releases of GCF, can be found at the GCF home page

Workplan

The framework is being tested by coupling various modules together, currently we are working on "Use Case 0". Michael's 2002 presentation (PPT) (HTML version) outlines the current state of affairs.

If you are interested in using your code with softIAM you should contact Rachel Warren.

Framework Interoperability

It is important that softIAM is interoperable with other frameworks such as iceni, TDT from PIK and GENIE. To this end, we will produce working documentations detailing various interactions between these, and other, frameworks:
  1. softIAM, TDT (MS Word)

Further Information

For more information on the science of the IAM contact Rachel Warren (r.warren@uea.ac.uk) at the Tyndall Centre.

Principal Investigators

The investigators on the Tyndall Centre funded project are:
Last updated: Spring 2005
More information from: michael.bane@manchester.ac.uk

Michael's:

  1. home page