Summary

A research proposal between the National Civil Engineering Laboratory (LNEC, Portugal) and the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU, U.S.A.) is briefly presented, to support the development of the existing partnership between these two institutions. This proposal aims to integrate complementary research strengths at the two institutions to improve and validate a sophisticated ecological modeling system for operational forecasting of ecosystem dynamics based on grid computing resources. The Portuguese partner will provide the ecological model and the expertise on grid-enabling of numerical models. The American partner will provide the expertise on parallel computing and the benchmark for validation and inter-model comparison. The specific goals of the project are:

1. to parallelize and grid-enable the ecological modeling system;
2. to validate and assess the performance of the modeling system in a coastal benchmark, based on the wealth of data collected in the coastal observatory of the Columbia river estuary and plume, and
3. to reinforce existing working collaborations and to establish a long-term relationship between the two institutions, through the identification of long-term funding mechanisms for common research goals.

This project will be an integral component of the new NSF Science and Technology Center for Coastal Margin Observation & Prediction (CMOP), a multi-year, multi-institution research center led by the American partner. The project also involves a suite of educational activities at OHSU and LNEC targeting young researchers at different stages of their careers. These students will benefit from the mentoring by an interdisciplinary team of experts in estuarine and coastal dynamics, thereby gaining early career introductions in a wide range of areas such as numerical modeling, ecosystem dynamics, parallel computing and grid-enabling of numerical models and the use of grid computing resources. Participation in workshops such as the annual ELCIRC/SELFE users’ meeting will provide an additional opportunity for these students to exchange their experience with other colleagues in the related fields of research and to provide them with a network of contacts.
Goals
The goals of BGEM are manifold:

Technical

• to validate a sophisticated ecological modeling system in controlled, well supported benchmark tests and to assess its performance against results from other models;
• to improve the performance of an existing ecological modeling system by parallelizing its ecological module;
• to demonstrate the usefulness of grid computing for the simulation of coastal and estuarine processes, using ecosystem dynamics as an example, and the Columbia river system as a testbed;
• to take advantage of the new grid developed in the scope of the "Rede Nacional de Computação Avançada” to improve the capabilities of the partners in tackling complex coastal problems.

Scientific

• to contribute towards improving our understanding of the dynamics of zooplankton.

Human

• to educate several young researchers in: 1) the importance of benchmarking numerical models, 2) the use of grid technologies;
• to create and strengthen partnerships between engineers, computer scientists, physicists and biologists with common interests in ecosystem dynamics in coastal regions.