Eco Grid

EcoGrid is a next generation internet architecture for data storage, sharing, access, and analysis. It combines the features of a Data Grid for storage of ecological data and a Compute Grid for analysis and modeling services. The EcoGrid allows scientists access to ecological, biodiversity and environmental data and analytic resources (such as: data, metadata, analytic workflows and processors) networked at different sites and at different organizations via the internet.

The EcoGrid will form the underlying framework for data and service discovery, data sharing and access, and analytical service sharing and invocation. Specifically, it will provide:

• seamless access and manipulation of ecology data and metadata stored at distributed nodes (including scalability, multiplicity of platforms (desktop to super computers) and storage devices);
• authentication through a single sign-on authentication and multi-level access control;
• execution of analytical pipelines via web services;
• node registry for data and compute nodes;
• rapid incorporation of new data sources as well as decades of legacy ecological data;
• extensible, ecologically relevant metadata based on the Ecological Metadata Language,and
• replication of data to provide fault tolerance, disaster recovery and load balancing

Current status

The EcoGrid has been designed as a series of Grid-service programming interfaces that accomplish seamless access to data via standardized service APIs. These lightweight APIs cover capabilities that allow client applications to query the distributed system, retireve metadata and data results, and write new and updated metadata and data back into the grid nodes. Four systems have implemented the EcoGrid service interfaces, including the KNB Metacat, the DiGIR system, the Storage Resource Broker, and the GEON Data Portal. Further refinements of the programming interfaces are being designed and tested before the initial release of the EcoGrid APIs.

The EcoGrid client library has been used by the Kepler scientific workflow system to access ecological and biodiversity collection data.