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The Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET)

 
 
ESG-CET sites worldwide

This map shows the geographic locations of the sites that use the Earth System Grid (ESG) to acquire climate simulation data, IPCC coupled model results, the CCSM climate model, and an array of analysis and visualization tools. ESG provides services to over 6,000 registered users around the world. (See larger image.)
 

The Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET) is a five-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) SciDAC-2 program to develop and deploy an international virtual facility for climate and related impacts research. A follow-on to our earlier ESG project, the effort has grown into a large-scale collaboration among NCAR (CISL, CGD, and HAO), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Interpretation (LLNL/PCMDI), NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (NOAA/PMEL), the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

ESG currently provides a production service for most of the joint NSF/DOE climate change simulations conducted over the last six years as well as the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report data holdings. Access is provided through a combination of a web portal plus desktop applications that mediate large-scale transfers to the user. ESG currently has over 6,000 registered users worldwide, manages over 180 TB of data in archives distributed around the nation, and has delivered over 300 TB of data to its constituents. From this past year alone, more than 300 scientific journal articles have been published from analyses of data delivered by the ESG. ESG thus plays an important role in advancing NCAR's strategic plan including "Developing and providing advanced services and tools," "Engaging a broader and more diverse community in the atmospheric and geosciences," "Creating an Earth system knowledge environment."

This effort intends to advance the global community's ability to improve climate research. It is also an excellent example of cross-agency collaboration to advance science. Details are available at the ESG website.

During FY2007 we continued to operate our production systems and grow our data offerings as new climate data products have become available. We have also developed and delivered a new multi-file download capability that makes it much easier for our users to acquire large sets of climate simulation results. Our primary focus this year has been to:

  • Develop new requirements for our internationally federated system
  • Research and create prototypes of new technology components
  • Forge relationships and plans with collaborators at international climate research and data centers

 

We have begun to work with the CCSM development group to identify next-generation strategies and processing capabilities to more strongly match the production model runs with ESG systems. One of the highlights of our work this year has been research and development work in using Semantic Web technologies to support a discovery and selection process that encompasses a broad range of digital assets (e.g. models, visualization tools, datasets, analyses, etc.). This reflects a scaffolding activity whereby we are leveraging some of the knowledge and experience gained in the Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO) project. While we had intended to integrate ESG as a TeraGrid Science Gateway in FY2007, security challenges delayed completion of this step. We have also begun refactoring and engineering a new, shared framework that will serve as a foundation for the new system.

In FY2008 we plan to develop and release a beta version of the new ESG environment, featuring semantically enabled user interfaces and discovery tools, international system federation, and a virtual organization infrastructure that links multiple "gateways" into a powerful community resource. Having now developed strategies for bridging across NCAR and TeraGrid security domains, we will establish ESG as a TeraGrid Science Gateway in FY2008 as well.

Primary support for this project is from DOE's Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing program contract DE-FC02-06ER25772 with additional support from NSF via NCAR's Cyberinfrastructure Strategic Initiative and NSF Core funding.