Developing an e-Research infrastructure for Australian earth sciences: the NCRIS 5.13 AuScope Grid

Abstract

On the 27 November 2006 the Minister for the Department of Education, Science and Technology announced that under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) $42.8 million would go to Australian Earth Sciences to help build an integrated national infrastructure system called AuScope.

A key element of AuScope is the AuScope Grid, which comprises an Earth Science Data Grid and a Compute Grid. Combined both provide a distributed computational e-Research infrastructure that will enable the construction of a dynamic updateable 4D Australian Earth Model.

The goal of the AuScope Compute Grid is to facilitate quantitative geoscience analysis by providing an infrastructure and tools for advanced data mining, simulation and computational modelling.

The AuScope Earth Science Data Grid is a proposed national geoscience data network, which aims to use international standards to allow real time access to data, information and knowledge stored in distributed repositories from academia, industry and government. The Data grid will be also built on ‘end-to-end’ Science principles (aka open access principles) whereby there will be access to the highly processed information and knowledge, as well as the original raw data and the processing programs used to generate the results. Show more