Grid in earth sciences
M. Petitdidier, R. Cossu, P. Mazzetti, Peter Fox, Horst Schwichtenberg, W. Som de Cerff · Earth Science Informatics · 2009
The Earth Sciences (ES) community, with its mosaic of disciplines and players such as academia, industry, national surveys, international organizations, has specific requirements described next.In particular, any observation depends on four coordinates (three spatial dimensions and time) and then needs geospatial tools for its use.The data policy is very complex and strict, as many real-time data may be strategic for the country and/or have an economic impact.In addition, the ES community provides short-term and medium-term predictions of weather and natural hazards in real-time and requires for those tasks immediate availability of resources by advance reservation or preemption.Model simulations of a host of phenomena relating to the Earth and its space environment need access to various large sets of data distributed geographically in different data centres.The various sources of data, among others, include satellite missions, observational networks, large instruments and simulations.To face the data deluge and more and more complex simulations, the ES community has started to use new technologies such as the Web and Grid.Web services were rapidly adopted by the ES community in particular to access and download data.The ES community started using the Grid around 2000.The experience acquired around the world via several academic and R&D applications has demonstrated that Grid infrastructures could respond to the complexity and constraints imposed by ES applications.However, the interface between the ES software environment and Grid middleware is not simple for many applications.Consequently, Grid technology is not yet widely adopted in ES.The term "Grid" emerged in the nineties, facilitated by the increase of network speeds, allowing the linking of time-efficient computing and storage resources (Foster and Kesselman 1999).The Grid responded to a pressing need for more computing resources to face and exploit the data deluge.The word "resources" has evolved and covers all that can be shared: computer, server, storage, database, services and so forth.Basic concepts lying behind the "Grid" are: collaboration, user and provider communities, and security.Users as