Platform dedicated to digital innovation in geosciences (PING)

PING is IGE’s cross-disciplinary platform dedicated to digital innovation in geosciences. It promotes best practices in scientific computing, fosters resource sharing, and supports research teams in numerical geosciences.

Main Objective

The platform’s ambition is to improve innovation in numerical geosciences across the laboratory, strengthen IGE’s capacity for innovation, and help research teams adapt to and actively contribute to ongoing transformations in numerical geosciences. PING brings together IGE staff whose work has a strong numerical component and who contribute to the platform for a portion of their time. Research engineers and working with and in multiple research teams are leading, contributing to, and supporting work within platform.

Contact

ige-ping-info univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Organisation and operation

Platform members are helping to accomplish the work within PING. PING operates by accomplishing shared work that is completed by the researchers and research engineers directly involved in PING activities. As a founding principle, PING strongly supports open science and open-source software. The platform prioritizes free and open-source solutions and collaborative, transparent working practices. PING also relies on shared infrastructures and services available, including resources locally in Grenoble site as well as national and European-level.

Missions

The core missions of the PING platform are to :

  • Promote best practices related to the digital aspects of scientific research within the laboratory.
  • Share training and educational resources on tools and methodologies, with a focus on newly emerging technologies, relevant to scientific computing in geosciences.
  • Design, support, and scale innovative scientific computing initiatives at the laboratory level, often building on ideas originating within IGE research teams.

PING also provides a framework for the cross-team activities supported by research engineers working at IGE. In coordination with the IT support at IGE, PING contributes to defining the laboratory’s strategy for computing resources, including infrastructure sharing and alignment with national and local initiatives. The platform advises laboratory leadership on issues related to scientific computing and emerging issues in numerical geosciences associated with the rapidly changing landscape of numerical and digital transformation, including data science.

Members

PING is co-led by a Research Engineer and a Scientist to ensure technical and scientific strategy for the platform. As of December 1, 2025, the co-leads are :

  • Aurélie Albert (Research Engineer, also affiliated with the MEOCEAN team)
  • Julien Le Sommer (Research Director, OPERA team)

A Scientific Steering Committee coordinates platform activities. In addition to the co-leads, it includes :

  • Vadim Bertrand (Research Engineer, PING)
  • Mykael Vigo (Research Engineer, also OPERA team)
  • Mondher Chekki (Research Engineer, also CRYODYN team)
  • Lucas Bastien (Research Engineer, also OPERA and CRYODYN teams)
  • Jennie Thomas (Research Director, also OPERA team)
  • Gaël Durand (Research Director, also CRYODYN team)

Projects

PING operates on a project basis, with each project having a clear scope, leadership, and participation from across the lab. These projects are :

DocCalcul
Development of a centralised documentation of resources related to scientific computing at the IGE, accessible in the form of a Jupyterbook hosted on GitHub.

OpenReproLab
Support framework for students to introduce them to methodolgies that ensure reproducibility and promoting best practices.

IGE-Jupyterhub
Deployment of a Jupyter notebook server accessible to all laboratory members.

GeoSciML
A shared space for questions about the application of machine-learning techniques to geosciences, promoting open, frugal, ethical, interpretable and responsible use.

InfraCloud
Exploration, prototyping and deployment of new services based on open and standard cloud technologies.

Processing Chains
Study and improvement of IGE processing chains by selecting appropriate technologies, methods and tools, prototyping and scaling up modeling and/or observation chains.

Hosting engineers
Definition of a framework for hosting engineers involved in scientific computing whose missions concern several IGE teams.