Developing Grid Based Infrastructure for Climate Modeling

In this paper we discuss the development of a high performance climate modeling system as an example of the application of Grid based technology to climate modeling. The climate simulation system at Argonne currently includes a scientific modeling interface (Espresso) written in Java which incorporates Globus middleware to facilitate climate simulations on the Grid. The climate modeling system also includes a high performance version of MM5v3.4 modified for long climate simulations on our 512 processor Linux cluster (Chiba City), an interactive web based tool to facilitate analysis and collaboration via the web, and an enhanced version of the Cave5D software capable of visualizing large climate data sets. We plan to incorporate other climate modeling systems such as the Fast Ocean Atmosphere Model (FOAM) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Community Climate Systems Model (CCSM) within Espresso to facilitate their application on computational grids.