Software System Design for Large Scale, Spatially-explicit Agroecosystem Modeling

Abstract

Recently, site-based agroecosystem model has been applied at regional and state level to enable comprehensive analyses of environmental sustainability of food and biofuel production. Those large-scale, spatially-explicit simulations present computational challenges in software systems design. Herein, we describe our software system design for large-scale, spatially-explicit agroecosystem modeling and data analysis. First, we describe the software design principles in three major phases: data preparation, high performance simulation, and data management and analysis. Then, we use a case study at a regional intensive modeling area (RIMA) to demonstrate our system implementation and capability.