Development of virtual organizations, applications and services for earth science on grid e-Infrastructures

Abstract

Grids emerged as a platform to share computational resources in the early 2000s. The grid concept was generalized to include the sharing of not just computational resources but also other resources such as data, devices, and applications in the so called virtual organizations (VOs). Grids will help us to move into the so-called e-Science era. E-Science refers to computational knowledge generation using various combinations of massive computational resources, data, and devices in highly distributed network environments. E-Science is the next natural step beyond the web-based platforms of the last decade that offers distribution of scientific data and running of applications through web interfaces on client–server architectures. Traditional web-based platforms have several shortcomings. Firstly, data and computational resources are basically decoupled. It is the duty of each scientist to manually download and manage all the data himself. Automation of this process may require the writing of various scripts which may be quite difficult for a user. Secondly, retrieving massive data over the web can be too slow and hence not practical. Grids can solve these problems by offering turn-key solution to such problems: Scientists can just acquire an account on a grid and become a member of a virtual organization associated with a field and instantly have access to all the resources such as applications, machines, devices, and data that they need. Hence, grids can help us to realize e-Science. Southeastern Europe Grid e-Infrastructure for Regional e-Science (SEE-GRID-SCI) (SEE-GRID eInfrastructure for regional eScience, http://www.see-grid-sci.eu) User Forum took place in Istanbul, Turkey during 9–10 December 2009 and brought together grid-oriented Earth Science community from the region. The User Forum provided a platform for presentation of Earth Science projects in the area of application deployment and service development for grid infrastructures. The user forum focused on three areas: seismology, meteorology, and environment. Thirty one papers were presented in the user forum covering a wide spectrum of applications and application services. The ten papers appearing in this issue were selected because they contributed state-of-the-art grid software and approaches that have the potential for wide adoption in the areas of seismology, meteorology, and environment. The papers presented in the special issue can be categorized as follows: