Architecture

All Curator work is being done in conjunction with the development of the DOE-funded Earth System Grid (ESG), a scientific gateway system that allows users to search for, download, and compare scientific datasets and model components. ESG consists of multiple gateways and data nodes located throughout the United States.

Diagram of ESG's distributed architecture

In the figure above, the center OpenID icon represents the Single Sign On functionality provided by the OpenID protocol, which allows ESG users to register at one Gateway and authenticate seamlessly at all others. The green boxes in the figure represent gateways. Gateways can be located at different locations or they can represent specialized projects co-located at the same institution. The blue boxes are data nodes. Each gateway can have one or more data node depending upon its storage needs. Finally, the gray boxes represent a sample of client applications that a user can use to interact with the data services provided by the Gateways and Data Nodes.

ESG Reference

To learn more about the Earth System Grid, please refer to the following paper: