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Short description: Development and deployment of earth science applications (e.g., global and regional climate models) to run in geographically distributed data and computing environments (GRID computing). |
The GRID provides transparent access to geographically distributed computational and storage resources. Several applications areas as high energy physics or bio-applications have proven to benefit from this computational paradigm. Applications from the Earth Science community are starting to take advantage of this technology (see e.g. www.eu-degree.eu). Earth Science (ES) applications and, in particular, weather and climate models, are nowadays among the most computer-power demanding tasks. Computers at different national weather services can often be found at the top 10 and most of the top general-purpose supercomputers run ES-related parallel applications. Moreover, a number of tasks such as ensemble prediction, sensitivity analysis, etc., consist of running the same application many times with small modifications in the configuration parameters, thus requiring an appropriate production infrastructure. GRID computing consists of a geographically distributed computing and data infrastructure linking computer resources (clusters) around the world in a transparent way using appropriate middleware. This infrastructure allows parametric and parallel computation in a simple form. The figure below shows an illustrative example of sensitivity analysis where the same application (the CAM atmospheric global model) is run several times from slightly perturbed Sea Surface Temperature (SST) conditions. Appropriate execution workflow programs control the computation of the experiment within GRID by restarting interrupted jobs, managing the input and output data, etc. (see the EELA CAM-demo for more details). ![]() In the last two decades, a number of other computer-demanding applications, such as High Energy Physics and Biomedicine applications, have migrated towards GRID tecnologies as a complementary way to fulfill their increasing CPU power and storage requirements. Thus, during the last few years a lot of effords has been made in order to have an European production GRID infrastructure for e-Science. The EGEE Project, the most important iniciative in Europe has 70 European partners and over 10000 CPUs and approximately 10 Petabytes of storage. Key reading: Activities of the Santander Meteorology Group: This research topic has his own resources (computing infrastructure) used by the members of the group to test and tune the applications and midlleware before running them in other production resources. UC Grid Application Support Centre: Gente: Cofiño, A.S., Fernández-Quiruelas, V., García-Torre, F., Blanco, C., Fernández, J., Fita, L. |