SciDAC has brought major advances in not only climate modeling but - equally importantly - in the management and sharing of distributed terascale data, via the Earth System Grid (ESG) project. With DOE SciDAC support, the multidisciplinary ESG team developed and delivered a production environment that serves a worldwide community with climate data from multiple models and institutions, ocean model data, CCSM source code distribution, and analysis and visualization tools. Data holdings are distributed across multiple sites including LANL, LBNL, LLNL, NCAR, and ORNL. ESG also provides a dedicated portal that supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) community in the development of its 4th Assessment Report (AR4). The ESG enterprise now supports 2500 registered users from around the globe; manages over 160 TB of data, models, and tools; and has delivered over 100 TB of data to its users. It is estimated that over 200 scientific publications focused upon the analysis of the IPCC data alone (distributed exclusively through ESG) have been authored.
As we progress towards petascale computational capabilities, associated data volumes will continue to spiral upwards, driving new requirements for effective data management and access systems for stakeholders. Beyond providing a valuable production service for the global climate community, ESG also provides insight into strategies and future directions for addressing these new challenges.
| *ESG PI’s: | Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory Don Middleton, National Center for Atmospheric Research Dean Williams, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, PCMDI |
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Additional ESG Collaborators: ANL - Veronica Nefedova; LBNL – Alex Romosan, Arie Shoshani, Alex Sim; LLNL/PCMDI – Bob Drach; NCAR – David Brown, Luca Cinquini, Peter Fox, Jose Garcia, Rob Markel, Gary Strand; ORNL: David Bernholdt, Mei-li Chen, USC/ISI - Ann Chervenak, Carl Kesselman, Robert Schuler