Development of the OMUSE/AMUSE Modeling System

The Oceanographic Multipurpose Software Environment (OMUSE, [1]) is an open source framework developed for oceanographic and other earth system modelling applications. OMUSE provides a homogeneous environment to interface with numerical simulation codes. It was developed at the IMAU (Utrecht) using coupling technology developed for astrophysical applications in the AMUSE project at Leiden Observatory[2,3]. OMUSE simplifies the use and deployment of numerical simulations codes. Furthermore, the design of the OMUSE interfaces (figure 1) allow codes that represent different physics or span different ranges of physical scales to be easily combined in novel numerical experiments. The use cases for OMUSE range from running simple numerical experiments with single codes and the addition of data analysis tools in model runs, to setting up fairly complicated and strongly coupled solvers for problems that are intrinsically multi-scale and/or require different physics. Here, we will present the design of OMUSE as well as give examples of the types of the couplings that can be implemented using OMUSE. The example provided by AMUSE and OMUSE suggests that application of the same interfacing philosophy to a more extensive set of disciplines is possible. In order to facilitate this a better separation of the core framework and domain specific code is necessary. We will present ongoing work to support meteorological and hydrological applications and the use of the framework as the computational core in the eWatercycle project [4]. For this, adaptations are made to improve the interoperability with existing interface efforts (such as the BMI) and we discuss developments regarding the encapsulation of OMUSE/AMUSE and its component models in containers. This will facilitate the installation for first time users, removing a barrier in this respect. In addition to this we anticipate this to also offer more flexible deployment options for the framework.