Developing an integrated end-to-end TeraGrid climate modeling environment

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a widely used community model for studying the climate system on the Earth. The CESM model is both data and computationally intensive, making it difficult for users to set up and run CESM simulations using local resources. In this paper, we describe an integrated climate modeling environment that supports CESM simulations on the TeraGrid, comprehensive model metadata description, and automatic archival of model data and metadata for easy community access. This system builds upon and integrates several existing efforts - the Purdue CCSM modeling portal, the Earth System Grid, the Earth System Modeling Framework, and the Earth System Curator. We present the design and implementation of our prototype system as well as an end-to-end usage scenario which is broken down into three workflows: model execution, data publishing, and metadata collection/publishing. The system will be used to support research and education on climate systems. We describe our plan and early efforts to engage users and obtain their feedback.