With the aim to help people to run
GEOtop and understand a little more its code, and having a preview of what its port to C++ means, I and
Mountain-eering organized a three days workshop with a few people interested. This is possible a seed for workshops for a larger audience.
The speaker was
Matteo Dall'Amico, a former Ph.D. student of mine, and at present one of the owners of Mountain-eering.
The workshop provided to participants the key information necessary to disentangle the complexity of GEOtop's use from the scratch: from its installation on the different platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac), including its compilation with the gnu compiler, understanding its discretization scheme and the input data, running some template example, working with SVN. There was also some little theory, especially about snow (but you can refer also to an
older post for the theory and some is also contained in the GEOtop History-
Part I and
Part II).
The slides of the three days can be found
here. However, they do not contain the full information, and should be used as an index of the thing to look for becoming really GEOtop proficient.
Matteo comment: most people (young Ph.D. students) do not understand that running a complex program like GEOtop being independent from others requires application to many things. If you want to play a musical instrument you probably need first to study music. Most of the people would find disturbing to learn solfeggio, or spend hours in obsessively repeating simple things to be able to play a simple harmony: but this is simply the way to go. First you have to learn to play the basics, and then steadily move on. You cannot pretend to do good hydrology just working with your intuition. You need tools. And tools require application. More than that for being a young researcher, you need to hold the details of most of your tools, not just to be able to strum with them.
ReplyDelete