Speaker
Jan Raciazek
Description
The work of the Earth Science activity in EGI-InSPIRE SA3 is devoted to Earth Science data access. The data from observations as well as simulations are often organized in geographically distributed databases. The data centers have developed service tools for basic research activities like searching, browsing and downloading of datasets; but those facilities are not directly available by ES applications running on EGI infrastructure. The goal of the “Earth Science service” in EGI-InSPIRE is to investigate and follow the development of specialized data access and management methods in the area of Earth Science such as satellite data via GENESI.DR or climate data via Earth System Grid federation (ESGF).
ESGF is an international collaboration providing access to state of the art CMIP5 climate data (Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project 5). The CMIP5 data stored in ESGF will permit to evaluate the impact of climate change in various environmental and societal areas, such as regional climate, extreme events, agriculture, insurance… The ESGF software stack has been deployed at a number of sites around the world and a number of projects are exploiting and building on this infrastructure. ESGF uses a federated identity management system which is based on OpenID and PKI (supports X.509 certificates), but is not directly interoperable with the one of EGI. It means that to exploit CMIP5 data within EGI, users need authentication and authorization (AA) to both federations (IGTF & ESGF). This complex problem prevents the exploitation of ESGF resources within EGI.
To analyze this situation and find solutions for the problems, a testbed is being deployed on EGI, consisting of a climate application that needs to access ESGF CMIP5 data to study extreme events. Different AA solutions will be discussed, of which one is based on Security Token Service (STS). Solutions will be available in the future by EGI-InSPIRE-SA3 and ESGF communities. We will present this ongoing work between the ES VRC in EGI-Inspire and ESGF.
Many European teams are working on the impact of climate change and face the problem of a lack of compute resources in connection with large data sets. This work will be important to facilitate the exploitation of the CMIP5 data on EGI.
ESGF is looking for a long term solution, based on ongoing developments of the ESG community, who are developing mechanisms to manage automatic mapping of credentials. The different interoperability solutions will be presented and have to be discussed between both trust federations (IGTF and ESGF).
