A Distributed Infrastructure for Ensemble Experiments

The WP3/NA2 of the EU IS-ENES project aims at the set up and deploy an e-infrastructure providing climate scientists with the needed virtual proximity to distributed data and distributed compute resources. The access point of this infrastructure is represented by the v.E.R.C. portal: it will allow the ESM scientists to run complex distributed workflows for running ESM experiments and accessing to ESM data. The focus of this report is on the deployment of a grid prototype for running ensembles of multi-model experiments. Considering existing grid infrastructures and services, the design of this grid prototype has been lead by the necessity to build a framework that will leverage the external services offered within the European HPC ecosystem, e.g., today by DEISA2 and in the future by PRACE. The prototype allows exploiting advanced grid services, namely GRB services, developed at the University of Salento, and basic grid services offered by the Globus Toolkit middleware in order for submitting and monitoring of ensemble runs. The prototype has been deployed involving two sites composed of the CMCC and DKRZ nodes. A third node, represented by the BSC, has been considered but its deployment is yet an on going activity. A case study related to the HRT159, a global coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation model (AOGCM) developed by CMCC-INGV, has been considered and preliminary tests carried out on CMCC and DKRZ sites are reported.