Speakers
Description of the Work
The ES Grid Community (ES VRC) will present an overview about the current activities and future plans. The “Services for Earth Science” task in EGI-Inspire concerns data services, being a key part of any ES application. The ES community requires several ways to access data and metadata outside of the EGI infrastructure, e.g. by using Grid-enabled database interfaces. The data centers usually also offer services or tools for basic research activities such as searching, browsing and downloading their datasets, but these are often not usable resp. accessible from applications executed on the Grid. The ES HUC task in EGI-Inspire aims to enable data to be accessed from the Grid. One current activity together with climate researchers is to couple the data oriented Earth System Grid (ESG) with computing resources of the EGI infrastructure. Challenges include the federation respectively mapping of the authentication and authorization methods, and the discovery, transfer, and archival of data.
Overview (For the conference guide)
This session will present activities of the Earth Science Grid Community on and around the European Grid Infrastructure. It will introduce the activities and future goals as well as current results. Examples of developments are the tools for web- and console-based data discovery and download, as well as the preparation of a Grid workflow that uses climate model data from Earth System Grid.
Conclusions
While the results achieved using EGI shows that the application of EGI resources is promising in the thematic area, the presented challenges respectively used tools also show possible points of future improvement in both technical as well as community-related properties of the EGI landscape.
Impact
The work of the ES VRC aims to support researchers from the wide topic of Earth Sciences in a variety of ways:
- by identifying common challenges and providing tools that help to solve them
- by stimulating the collaboration between groups / communities working on similar topics or having similar problems. To help solving problems and to avoid redundant work.
- raising the popularity of distributed computing infrastructures in the area to attain an active community
- help representing the community in the consortia of EGI, e.g. by voicing the requirements
- give prospective users a generic contact and support point
- enable international collaboration, directly and through cooperation of research projects
