Data issues at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change

Earth Science Informatics, Mar 2009

Climate Change research is even more becoming a data intensive and oriented scientific activity. Petabytes of climate data, big collections of datasets are continuously produced, delivered, accessed, processed by scientists and researchers at multiple sites at an international level. This work presents the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) initiative, discussing data and metadata issues and dealing with both architectural and infrastructural aspects concerning the adopted grid enabled solution. A complete overview of the grid services deployed at the Centre is presented as well as the client side support (CMCC data portal and monitoring dashboard).

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Data issues at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change

S. Fiore S. Vadacca A. Negro G. Aloisio Climate Change research is even more becoming a data intensive and oriented scientific activity. Petabytes of climate data, big collections of datasets are continuously produced, delivered, accessed, processed by scientists and researchers at multiple sites at an international level. This work presents the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) initiative, discussing data and metadata issues and dealing with both architectural and infrastructural aspects concerning the adopted grid enabled solution. A complete overview of the grid services deployed at the Centre is presented as well as the client side support (CMCC data portal and monitoring dashboard). - Climate change represents an important and critical challenge for several scientists and researchers. Increasingly complex simulation models, management of petabytes of datasets (which are already too massive for current storage devices) are issues that must be faced up to in the related centres. Key elements that must be taken into account are strongly connected both with data and metadata management. In this paper we introduce the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) initiative and the adopted data grid solution for the management of climate datasets. Despite the classical approaches, data-gridenabled solutions (Berman et al. 2003; Foster 2005; Foster et al. 2001) greatly address scalability (users, data, queries, etc.), transparency (access, integration, management, presentation) and efficiency (performance) allowing the management of huge and distributed datasets. The CMCC represents a fully distributed environment, is comprised of several sites, partners, etc. and it is an harmonic mix of different skills in the field of climate modeling, economy, impact studies and information technology. Taking into consideration the climate data growth rate, it is our considered opinion that a full decentralized schema for the management of data and metadata (addressing data availability, scalability, site autonomy and efficiency) represents the most suitable solution in the proposed environment. In this paper we present and discuss in detail the data grid management solution adopted at the CMCC. First of all, before presenting the overall architecture designed at the Centre (a view in the large related to the involved data and metadata services/components) we provide a complete analysis concerning the main challenges driving our work (secure, efficient and transparent distributed data management, interoperability, metadata search and discovery, etc.). Then we concentrate our attention and we delve into details of three fundamental pillars: data management, metadata management and user support providing technical motivations behind our choices and additional information about how the data/metadata related issues have been faced and solved at the Centre. Concerning metadata management we present the adopted CMCC metadata schema and the related implementation, the CMCC metadata handling architecture and infrastructure, the distributed metadata search, etc. On the other hand, for the data management part, we deal with data transfer, access, replication and management services and issues. Security is also discussed from several points of view. Moreover, we talk about the available user support presenting the CMCC data portal, the available command line interface and the CMCC monitoring dashboard. Finally we discuss related works highlighting differences and analogies with the proposed solution and we draw our conclusions in the last section. The CMCC initiative In 2005, the Italian government, through the Ministry of the Environment and Protection (MATT), the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), and the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) started a scientific initiative (namely the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change, CMCC) aimed at establishing a national research centre devoted to climate change research. The main partners of this initiative are six Italian research Institutes (the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, the University of Salento, the Italian Aerospace Research Center, the University of Sannio, and the Consorzio Venezia Ricerche). As it can be argued this Centre is distributed in nature among several sites at a geographical scale (see Fig. 1) and is comprised of several research divisions which provide support for computing and operations activities, numerical modeling, impact studies (on health, energy, economy, coastal zone, Mediterranean sea, agriculture, etc.), training and dissemination. This Centre represents the most ambitious initiative undertaken in Italy, within the framework of the National Research Plan, and specifically the National Research Plan on Climate. One of the basic idea behind CMCC is to create a unified environment able to concentrate in the same place numerical models, sim (...truncated)


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S. Fiore, S. Vadacca, A. Negro, G. Aloisio. Data issues at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change, Earth Science Informatics, 2009, pp. 23-35, Volume 2, Issue 1-2, DOI: 10.1007/s12145-009-0023-x