Paleoscape model of coastal South Africa during modern human origins: progress in scaling and coupling climate, vegetation, and agent-based models on XSEDE

To better understand the origins of modern humans, we are developing a paleoscape model that simulates the climatic conditions and distribution of natural resources available to humans during this critical stage of human evolution. Our geographic focus is the southern Cape region of South Africa, which was rich in natural resources for hunter-gatherer groups including edible plants, shellfish, animals, and raw materials. We report our progress in using the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) to realize the paleoscape model, which consists of four components: a climate model, correlative and dynamic vegetation models, and agent-based models. We adopt a workflow-based approach that combines modeling and data analytics to couple these four modeling components using XSEDE. We have made significant progress in scaling climate and agent-based models on XSEDE. Our next steps will be to couple these models to the vegetation models to complete the workflow, which will require overcoming multiple theoretical, methodological, and technical challenges.