Abstract
The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a multi-agency,
international collaboration that aims at developing the software
infrastructure needed to facilitate and empower the study of
climate change on a global scale. The ESGF’s architecture
employs a system of geographically distributed peer nodes,
which are independently administered yet united by the adoption
of common federation protocols and application programming
interfaces (APIs). The cornerstones of its interoperability are the
peer-to-peer messaging that is continuously exchanged among all
nodes in the federation; a shared architecture and API for search
and discovery; and a security infrastructure based on industry
standards (OpenID, SSL, GSI and SAML). The ESGF software
is developed collaboratively across institutional boundaries and
made available to the community as open source. It has now been
adopted by multiple Earth science projects and allows access
to petabytes of geophysical data, including the entire model
output used for the next international assessment report on
climate change (IPCC-AR5) and a suite of satellite observations
(obs4MIPs) and reanalysis data sets (ANA4MIPs).
