High-level Roadmap

The Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET, "Scaling the Earth System Grid to Petascale Data") is focused on scaling up the current ESG system to meet the needs of Data Partners listed on the Home page. The scientific goals and requirements of these projects challenge the ESG-CET to innovate in many aspects of computer science and data management in order to deliver the tools they need. Before the end of the SciDAC2 project, we anticipate that the ESG will be used to offer tens of Petabytes of data across a federation of perhaps two dozen data centers across the world, providing seamless access to data to both web-based clients, and directly to analysis clients. An important element of the next generation of the ESG will be to provide users with just the information they really want, by incorporating server-side analysis capabilities to reduce the raw data before it is delivered to the user. To support this effort, we will broaden ESG to support multiple types of model and observational data, provide more powerful (client-side) ESG access and analysis services, enhance interoperability between common climate analysis tools and ESG, and enable end-to-end simulation and analysis workflow. The figure depicts the scientific data management and analysis requirements in relationship to the ESG development timeframe. We specifically note that a distributed testbed for CMIP5 (IPCC AR5) will be in place by mid to late 2009.

Click to view full-size image…