The Earth System Grid Federation: An Open Infrastructure for Access to Distributed Geospatial Data

Journal Article · Mon Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 2012 · Future Generation Computer Systems

OSTI ID:1092328

Ananthakrishnan, Rachana ^[1]; Bell, Gavin ^[2]; Cinquini, Luca ^[3]; Crichton, Daniel ^[3]; Danvil, Sebastian ^[4]; Drach, Bob ^[2]; Fiore, Sandro ^[5]; Gonzalez, Estanislao ^[6]; Harney, John F ^[7]; Mattmann, Chris ^[3]; Kershaw, Philip ^[8]; Miller, Neill ^[1]; Morgan, Mark ^[4]; Pascoe, Stephen ^[8]; Schweitzer, Roland ^[9]; Shipman, Galen M ^[7]; Wang, Feiyi ^[7]

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1. Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)
2. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
3. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
4. Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL), Des Sciences de L'Environnement
5. Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change
6. German Climate Computing Center
7. ORNL
8. STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, NCAS/BADC
9. Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a multi-agency, international collaboration that aims at developing the software infrastructure needed to facilitate and empower the study of climate change on a global scale. The ESGF s architecture employs a system of geographically distributed peer nodes, which are independently administered yet united by the adoption of common federation protocols and application programming interfaces (APIs). The cornerstones of its interoperability are the peer-to-peer messaging that is continuously exchanged among all nodes in the federation; a shared architecture and API for search and discovery; and a security infrastructure based on industry standards (OpenID, SSL, GSI and SAML). The ESGF software is developed collaboratively across institutional boundaries and made available to the community as open source. It has now been adopted by multiple Earth science projects and allows access to petabytes of geophysical data, including the entire model output used for the next international assessment report on climate change (IPCC-AR5) and a suite of satellite observations (obs4MIPs) and reanalysis data sets (ANA4MIPs).

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Center for Computational Sciences
• Sponsoring Organization: SC USDOE - Office of Science (SC)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1092328
• Journal Information: Future Generation Computer Systems, Journal Name: Future Generation Computer Systems
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

Climate Modelling
Earth Systems Grid
P2P systems