NOAA scientific research is supported by thousands of computers scattered throughout the laboratories ranging from individual workstations to large-scale clusters. Most of these resources are only available to local users. A lack of connectivity inhibits sharing between or even within labs. As a result, huge numbers of compute cycles go unused and opportunities are lost to increase the scale of scientific modeling. Meanwhile, advances in network backbone technologies and middleware offer a new opportunity to share these resources. Organizations such as NASA and NSF provide seamless, secure shared access to member computers via a computational grid constructed from these technologies. A computational grid is analogous to an electrical power grid in the sense that, once plugged in, a user theoretically has access to resources provided anywhere on the grid.

The Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) is leading an effort to set-up a prototype NOAA computational grid using Globus middleware. From various funding sources including an FY '03 NOAA HPCC grant, we have developed a rudimentary grid consisting of one Intel Linux machine located at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) and several others situated at FSL. A version of the Weather Research and Forecast model has been coupled with the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) over this grid. One model runs at PMEL, the other at FSL and the boundary conditions are exchanged over the Abilene network connection between the two labs. Experiments show that the communication bandwidth and latency are such that it is quite feasible to execute this loosely coupled model over the grid.

The objective of this research is to determine how NOAA can exploit grid technology for scientific computing. The original intent was to explore the TeraGrid. However, due to the fact that the TeraGrid became available much later than expected, the project funds were instead used to construct a rudimentary grid consisting of nodes located at FSL and PMEL. The Globus toolkit is used to connect the resources together. Much more detail can be found in a FY '03 Final Report for the FY '03 Proposal. An FY '03 Presentation is also available. As the report and proposal discuss, one of the deliverables was a prototype coupled model. A second deliverable was a release of a version of the Scalable Modeling System that support grid computing. This release (2.8.0) can be found here. During the course of the project, a coupled version of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) and Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) models became available for testing across the rudimentary grid. The final report discusses performance results for that testing.

This research extends the '03 effort to include more computational resources at FSL, PMEL and GFDL. A rudimentary grid scheduler has been constructed that allows jobs to be submitted to any resources on the grid using a local client command. Once authenticated onto the grid, users can login to any other machine on the grid without having to re-authenticate. They may also copy files from one grid node to another. A certificate authority has been constructed using the Globus SimpleCA package. Grid certificates are stored in and MyProxy database. Users retrieve short-duration certifcate proxies from this database. Further detail on this effort can be found in a FY '04 Final Report for the FY '04 Proposal. An FY '04 Presentation is also available. A proposal to enhance the NOAA grid prototype security sufficiently to allow inclusion of the High Performance Computing Systems at GFDL, FSL and NCEP has also been put forth. An FY '05 Proposal to upgrade the prototype grid to use Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) has been accepted for funding.