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This grant will provide basic user support for the GENESIS project including:
Support for GENESIS distribution, including maintenance of the public GENESIS and BABEL distribution sites, and continued distribution via CD-ROMs when necessary.
On-line user support, for problems arising in the use of GENESIS, bug reports, and references to sources of information about GENESIS or its use. We will also continue to provide support for the GENESIS users group BABEL including the creation of member accounts, periodic newsletters, and the development of a BABEL Bulletin Board System.
Support for Documentation. With any software project as complex as GENESIS, good documentation is essential to support use. Unfortunately, it is rare that contributed software components come with adequate documentation. Therefore, there is a continuous need for the core support staff to generate documentation for new features generated in house, or contributed. As part of the documentation effort, we will continue to create short example scripts to illustrate specific GENESIS features. Library enhancements. The GENESIS support team is continually receiving new library submissions from GENESIS users including both model components and new models themselves. To be useful, these components need to be integrated into the libraries. These new features also often require additional documentation. Software ports. Research into software maintenance shows that more than half of the effort in a large software project is expended on maintenance activities. With support from this grant we will continue to assure that GENESIS compiles on new hardware and software operating systems.
Support for Parallel users. While GENESIS is now fully parallel with ports to both MPI as well as PVM, the use of parallel GENESIS still requires special support for new users, including coordination with the supercomputer centers (e.g. The San Diego and Pittsburgh Super Computer Centers) providing access to these machines. This support includes both documentation and email support.