Climate-G: an international testbed on climate change

Climate-G is an interdisciplinary and unfunded research project aiming to create a Virtual Research Environment for climate change. It is built on top of the EGEE infrastructure and exploits transparently accessible compute and data resources through the Climate-G Portal. The Climate-G testbed addresses several challenges at the architectural and infrastructural level.

Managing hundreds of Petabytes
The size of climate datasets continues to spiral as model complexity, resolution levels, and the number of experiments continue to increase. Thus, the first challenge for Climate-G comes from the need to address scalability, performance and local site autonomy, and from the unfeasibility of moving such large data volumes in a centralized repository. Large-scale data federation is one opportunity to effectively share data produced by several centres. Such a distribution schema can include replication strategies to increase data availability.

Distributed grid and P2P metadata
To make such a large volume of widespread data really accessible, a strong metadata framework is needed. Scalability and autonomy are currently addressed using a distributed approach, exploiting a CMCC metadata management solution that leverages P2P and grid technologies. The service, called GRelC, is included in the EGEE RESPECT program, and can manage metadata information held in heterogeneous grid data sources. It enables sharing, search, and discovery of geographical data. 

Creation of a scientific gateway: the Climate-G Portal
The third challenge addressed by the Climate-G testbed is the creation of a seamless and ubiquitous access point: the Climate-G Portal. The portal is intended for scientists and researchers who want to easily and transparently manage the climate change experiments available in the Climate-G digital library. It provides functionalities including data search and discovery, metadata annotation and validation, data access, and visualization.
The Climate-G Portal aims to be an “integrated working environment”, where scientists can access huge volumes of data with complete metadata support and a wide set of data access services, data visualization and analysis tools, and easy access to the underlying EGEE infrastructure to run via web processing, analysis software and so on.
A new EGEE Virtual Organization has been established to support the climate change community via the Climate-G testbed, and EGEE have allocated additional storage and compute resources to support our experiments. Already, about 60 users are accessing the system via the portal (measured from April 2009).

Collaborative success
The EGEE NA4 Steering Committee, EGEE Activity Management Board and the European Commission called Climate-G “indicative of the excellent scientific work being done on the grid and of the advancement of grid services/tools”; Climate-G representatives also demonstrated the testbed to an EC-appointed panel during the 2009 EGEE-III review.
The Climate-G collaboration continues to grow. The initial phase involved Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC, Italy), Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL/CNRS, France) and Fraunhofer Institut für Algorithmen und Wissenschaftliches Rechnen (SCAI, Germany). Now other centres and institutions have joined the testbed, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR, USA), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI, USA), University of Reading (Reading, UK), University of Cantabria (UC, Spain), and University of Salento (UniSalento, Italy).

Looking to the future
Moving forward, Climate-G aims to (i) extend its existing functionalities, services and tools (ii) act as a virtual laboratory for partners to test and validate software developments useful in the climate change domain and (iii) establish strategic synergies with new partners and projects at an international level.

Full information is available at: http://grelc.unile.it:8080/ClimateG-DDC/