CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment plans

Grid-BGC plans

During the upcoming year our primary goals are to:

• Release a production-grade version of the Grid-BCG science portal to the biogeochemistry community along with user and system documentation.

• Finalize the production services architecture and implementation.

• Evaluate the feasibility of deploying some of these services at other sites (e.g., on the Columbia system at NASA or on systems designated by our beta users).

• Extend the service-oriented architecture to include visualization and data services.

The key research question to be addressed in the coming year is how to extend the service oriented architecture developed for the Grid-BGC science portal to support other science projects. NCAR has a long history of providing codes, data and consulting services, and compute cycles to the atmospheric sciences community. However, these services have typically not been tightly integrated. The hope is that the Grid-BGC project will help NCAR to expand the notion of infrastructure beyond facilities and hardware to encompass software development and integration to provide a set of seamless discipline-specific services to the community. It is our hope that integrating these "services" into a single end-to-end solution would benefit our users and lead to increased scientific productivity.