Enhancing Seismic Calibration Research Through Software Automation and Scientific Information Management

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Ground-Based Nuclear Explosion Monitoring Research and Engineering (GNEM R&E) Program at LLNL has made significant progress enhancing the process of deriving seismic calibrations and performing scientific integration, analysis, and information management with software automation tools. Several achievements in schema design, data visualization, synthesis, and analysis were completed this year. Our tool efforts address the problematic issues of very large datasets and varied formats encountered during seismic calibration research. As data volumes have increased, scientific information management issues such as data quality assessment, ontology mapping, and metadata collection that are essential for production and validation of derived calibrations have negatively impacted researchers abilities to produce products. New information management and analysis tools have resulted in demonstrated gains in efficiency of producing scientific data products and improved accuracy of derived seismic calibrations. Significant software engineering and development efforts have produced an object-oriented framework that provides database centric coordination between scientific tools, users, and data. Nearly a half billion parameters, signals, measurements, and metadata entries are all stored in a relational database accessed by an extensive object-oriented multi-technology software framework that includes elements of stored procedures, real-time transactional database triggers and constraints, as well as coupled Java and C++ software libraries to handle the information interchange and validation requirements. Significant resources were applied to schema design to enable recording of processing flow and metadata. A core capability is the ability to rapidly select and present subsets of related signals and measurements to the researchers for analysis and distillation both visually (JAVA GUI client applications) and in batch mode (instantiation of multi-threaded applications on clusters of processors). Development of efficient data exploitation methods has become increasingly important throughout academic and government seismic research communities to address multi-disciplinary large scale initiatives. Effective frameworks must also simultaneously provide the researcher with robust measurement and analysis tools that can handle and extract groups of events effectively and isolate the researcher from the now onerous task of database management and metadata collection necessary for validation and error analysis. Sufficient information management robustness is required to avoid loss of metadata that would lead to incorrect calibration results in addition to increasing the data management burden. Our specific automation methodology and tools improve the researchers ability to assemble quality-controlled research products for delivery into the NNSA Knowledge Base (KB). The software and scientific automation tasks also provide the robust foundation upon which synergistic and efficient development of, GNEM R&E Program, seismic calibration research may be built