Speaker
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
Climate research is generally data-intensive. Observation, analysis and output data
of climate simulations are traditionally stored in large archives and central
databases. They vary highly in quality and in accessibility. Thus searching, finding
and retrieving the data is often highly inefficient. To enable and ease effective
data retrieval as well as collaborative work in the often interdisciplinary projects,
an intelligent and sustainable (meta-)data management infrastructure is needed.
With a forward look to future evolution, discuss the issues you have encountered (or that you expect) in using the EGEE infrastructure. Wherever possible, point out the experience limitations (both in terms of existing services or missing functionality)
The outlined approach does not only advance the interoperability of the two grid
projects, but also stimulates synergy effects by combining the strengths of the two
systems. Using standards along with international agreements allows for
interoperability with international partners, such as the British NERC DataGrid and
the US-American Earth System Grid, and with other communities, such as the GIS
community. The next issue that needs to be solved is the match of the different
security systems.
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
As a first step, we used adapted tools and concepts developed in the German community
driven Grid initiative C3-Grid (http://www.c3-grid.de/) to port the prototype of a
typical climate data analysis workflow to the EGEE infrastructure (demonstrated at
EGEE’06 conference).
Based on these experiences we now improve the structure and tighten the integration
of the two systems. Of the C3-Grid, the central Web portal and uniform access
interfaces, implemented at German Earthsystem science data centers, are used to
initially search, find and retrieve the data and also to publish resulting metadata
of already processed data. Processing can be done on EGEE. The Amga catalog is used
as a central instance to receive and update the necessary runtime information of data
produced or altered in the processing jobs. An interface is implemented to the Amga
catalog to enable the automatic harvesting and hence republishing of the resulting
metadata into the central C3 Web portal.
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
Currently, to find, retrieve, and process climate data mostly complex individual
solutions are used. Processed data is commonly stored locally and undocumented. Thus,
identical analysis are redone by various scientists.
Enabling searching and browsing of the various data in a central catalog according to
content, quality and processing history would ease the discovery of data. An
intelligent, transparent data access would simplify the data retrieval. Selectable
basic processing options and an automatic republishing of the processed data would
support the daily workflows of climate scientists and facilitate further processing
or usage of the results.
To realize this, besides conceptual agreements also common protocols and logging
facilities, common authorization and authentication standards and finally also common
resources to effectively share tools and data are required. EGEE offers solutions for
most of these challenges and is thus a logical choice as basis for such an infrastructure
