CandC:PandE Referee Report Form -- Electronic Transimission to mailto:"Geoffrey%20Fox(CandC:PandE%20Referee%20Report)"%20<fox@csit.fsu.edu>strongly preferred

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A: General Information

Please fill in Summary Conclusions (Sec. C) and details as appropriate in Secs. D, E and F.

B: Refereeing Philosophy

We encourage a broad range of readers and contributors. Please judge papers on their technical merit and separate comments on this from those on style and approach. Keep in mind the strong practical orientation that we are trying to give the journal. Note that the forms attached provide separate paper for comments that you wish only the editor to see and those that both the editor and author receive. Your identity will of course not be revealed to the author.

C: Paper and Referee Metadata

• Paper Number Cnnn:  C501
• Date:  May 31, 2001
• Paper Title:  Parallelization of a Large-Scale Computational Earthquake Simulation Program

• Author(s):  K.F. Tiampo , J.B. Rundle , S. Gross and S. McGinnis

• Referee:  David W. Walker

• Address:  Department of Computer Science

                         Cardiff University

                         PO Box 916

                         Cardiff  CF24 3XF

                         United Kingdom

Referee Recommendations. Please indicate overall recommendations here, and details in following sections.

1. publish as is
2. accepted provided changes suggested are made
3. reject  X

D: Referee Comments (For Editor Only)

    There is really nothing to this paper. Some results for a GA code running in master-slave mode on two workstations is given. Then a description of a sequential code for earthquake simulation is given, together with a listing of the parallel code. There is no discussion of the parallel code and no results are presented!

E: Referee Comments (For Author and Editor)

    I believe it is premature to publish your work at this stage. The results that you present for the GA running on two workstations is not very illuminating. You should discuss in more detail how the Virtual California simulation was parallelized and present some results. I think it would be best if you waited until the large Beowulf system you describe in Section 2.1 is ready for use, and then run your codes on this system. Then it will be possible to get some idea of the scalability of your parallel algorithm, and the extent to which you are able to exploit the low-cost cluster-based approach in your simulations.

F: Presentation Changes