UK e-Researchers aid efforts to understand climate change

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Providing decision makers with information about the potentially disastrous effects of climate change is the role of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Attaining new levels of detail and precision in their predictions requires access to ever greater volumes of data. This challenge is being aided by expertise developed by the Natural Environment Research Council Datagrid (NDG) during an OMII-UK funded project.

The IPCC would like researchers to have access to fifteen-hundred terabytes of data – fifty-times more than previously available. Storing this data volume using conventional methods would be difficult, so e-Research solutions are being exploited. Namely, a distributed archive based on the pooled resources of the British Atmospheric Data Centre, the World Data Centre for Climate in Germany and a US federation led by the PCMDI (Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison). Fifteen-hundred terabytes of data represents a substantial amount of research and funding. It is no surprise then, that the data producers and funding agencies want some oversight over who is using the data, and for what purpose.

Securing access across organisational boundaries in a way that is transparent to users presents many significant challenges. The NDG project has already addressed these challenges in its OMII-UK funded security solution: NDG Security. This software provides authentication of a user’s identity and authorisation of their rights over distributed resources. The NDG Security team are now applying their expertise in a collaboration with the US Earth System Grid (ESG)—the team responsible for developing the IPCC’s distributed archive. The collaboration has agreed on a standards-based approach for secure distributed access. ESG software will form the heart of the distributed archive, and the ESG group of Earth Science research centres will form a natural extension of the core data archive. The security solution adopted for the NDG/ESG collaboration will facilitate the inclusion of other institutions into the consortium, whether they are from Europe, the US or elsewhere.

This work for the IPCC is a good example of what e-Research does well: complex problems, huge data sets and multiple users are all dealt with efficiently. It is also a vindication of the open-source model for funding, with money invested in one project creating expertise that can be re-used to directly benefit other projects. If we are to prepare for climate change, it is vital that we have accurate information about the potential changes that we may encounter—e-Research may be the key to that information.

Simon Hettrick.

An overview of NDG Security

NDG’s work with the IPCC was built on expertise gained during the development of NDG Security. But what is NDG Security? We asked Phil Kershaw, lead developer at NDG, to explain.

NDG enables scientists to discover, access and visualise data that spans data-provider organisations. Secure access is key: without it, some providers would not publish their data.

Unifying data-centre infrastructures requires many challenges to be overcome. The system must be easy to deploy and maintain, and it must be flexible so that partner organisations do not have to change their pre-existing infrastructures. NDG Security was designed to address these requirements. It supports Single Sign On, and a system of access-role mapping, which enables federated access to data whilst respecting existing role structures at individual sites. Use of the Python programming language provides a familiar and easy-to-use environment for the scientific user base.

NDG is used by some of the major UK data centres, such as the British Atmospheric Data Centre and the British Oceanographic Data Centre. Related projects have also included the Met Office and partners from industry.

Recent OMII-UK funding has enabled NDG Security to develop and evolve to encompass new technologies and standards, including OpenID, SAML and support for Java and Perl-based interfaces. These developments greatly enhance the interoperability of NDG Security and have perfectly placed it for the current interoperability work with the Earth System Grid.

Phil Kershaw, NERC DataGrid.

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