Grid-BGC: A Grid-Enabled Terrestrial Carbon Cycle Modeling System

Grid-BGC is a Grid-enabled terrestrial biogeochemical cycle simulator collaboratively developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado (CU) with funding from NASA. The primary objective of the project is to utilize Globus Grid technology to integrate inexpensive commodity cluster computational resources at CU with the mass storage system at NCAR while hiding the logistics of data transfer and job submission from the scientists. We describe a typical process for simulating the terrestrial carbon cycle, present our solution architecture and software design, and describe our implementation experiences with Grid technology on our systems. By design the Grid-BGC software framework is extensible in that it can utilize other grid-accessible computational resources and can be readily applied to other climate simulation problems which have similar workflows. Overall, this project demonstrates an end-to-end system which leverages Grid technologies to harness distributed resources across organizational boundaries to achieve a cost-effective solution to a compute-intensive problem.