Plan and Milestones for 2006:

The TPAC OpenDAP network is now complete. Many of the datasets continue to expand, and several new datasets will be brought online throughout 2006. In particular, once BMRC has completed adding security features to the OpenDAP server software, many of its operational datasets will be made available to the wider research community.

Milestones for Digital Library Repositories
• Sea-surface & sub-surface temperature analysis products (BMRC) [Dec 2006]
• ACE CRC sea-ice simulations, 1980-2000 (ACE CRC) [Dec 2006]

To increase the utility of the digital repositories, we plan to support and develop server-side analysis and visualisation services (refer ESS Grid Vision figure). This will allow users to display of the contents of the digital repositories, and allow very large datasets to be manipulated prior to sending the normally much smaller results across the web to client programs. For example, a user could average many satellite images or calculate the global temperature from a very long model simulation on the server hosting the data, rather than downloading large amounts of data over the network to perform the analysis on their client machine.

These server-side services will be based on standard open-source tools such as the Live Access Server (LAS), and GrADS Data Server (GDS). Additionally, we plan to include web-services (OGC compliant) portals to allow the OpenGIS (or XML) based communities to access these services using standard web clients (refer ESS Grid Architecture figure).

Milestones for Digital Library Tools
• Development of web-services specification documents [complete]
• Development of WMS-LAS wrapper (Insight4) [Oct 2006]
• Development of WCS-OpenDAP wrapper [Dec 2006]

Selected earth system models will be ported to all high performance computing platforms that will be participating in the National Grid. This single step will allow many new users to use these models immediately on the APAC and partner facilities. The selected models will be transitioned to grid based models executable on the Grid, and will become complete portals in their own right.

Much of the scientific analysis of datasets produced in large-scale earth system simulations is routine, in principle. Standard discrete operations such as averaging of fields, flux calculations, etc are repeated time and again – over different data, different geographic or temporal regions, and in different composite workflows. We plan to develop an earth systems science toolkit implementing some of these key operations, and by grid-enabling the toolkit users will be able to execute such routine workflows efficiently on the Grid.

Milestones for Compute Grid
• Porting of selected ESS models to APAC partner facilities [ongoing]
• Development of model portals [ongoing]
• Implementation of an ESS analysis work-flow portal [Dec 2006]

By the end of 2006 we will have the various portals up and running on the National Grid - data discovery, visualisation, analysis toolkit. We then plan to integrate these individual portals to form a complete earth systems science workflow portal. This will enable researchers to discover datasets of interest, to visualise the contents of those datasets, and to do simple analysis with the data - all within the one web-based portal environment.