ACE: Age Calculation Engine-A Design Environment for Cosmogenic Dating Techniques

ACE (age calculation engine; previously called iCronus) is a design environment for analyzing data used in cosmogenic dating methods. It is supported by a software architecture designed with flexibility, scalability, security and safety in mind. These properties have allowed us to create an environment that directly supports the tasks that geoscientists perform as they work on developing new algorithms for cosmogenic dating, such as running calibrations, defining new experiments, and evaluating the impacts of scaling factors on the calculated ages of samples. Our goal is to provide geoscientists using cosmogenic dating methods with a flexible and powerful software infrastructure upon which to base their future research efforts. In this paper, we describe the design of the ACE system and compare it to existing cosmogenic dating software. We also discuss how our system has been evaluated and our plans for future work.