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Prototyping an Earth System Grid

The Accelerated Climate Prediction Initiative seeks to improve understanding of climate change and predictability by conducting tens of century-long high-resolution climate simulations. Community analysis of the resulting Petabyte-scale datasets will require the creation of an Earth Systems Grid that supports high-speed data transport between climate research centers and flexible remote access for distributed scientific analysis. These requirements are Next Generation Internet challenges, requiring major improvements in achieved bandwidth and network services. This project will address both challenges by the coordinated development and integration of advanced applications, middleware, and network services, with the goal of enabling (a) rapid, guaranteed-performance movement of datasets and (b) flexible distributed data analysis, via decomposition of analysis programs across remote and local systems.

Building on extant utilities (DPSS, Globus, and STACS) and expertise, new middleware will be developed for high-performance data transfer, remote access to data subsets, remote execution of analysis components, and distributed cache management. At the network level, new techniques will be developed for high-speed interface design, integration with differentiated service quality of service mechanisms, and automated protocol tuning in heterogeneous high-speed environments. These new techniques will be provided to the climate community via extensions to widely used climate data analysis clients and the creation of a prototype Earth Systems Grid based on existing supercomputers, data archives, and networks. The collaborative team features experts in applications, middleware, and networking from four DOE Laboratories (ANL, LANL, LBNL, LLNL), an NSF center (NCAR), and two universities (University of Wisconsin and the University of Southern California).

A PDF file of the proposal can be viewed here.