The R&D 100 awards, announced this week, honour great Research & Development Pioneers and their revolutionary ideas in science and technology.

This year an award has been made to the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), a collaboration of groups, agencies and institutions around the world that are dedicated to the development and operation of a long-term system for the management, access and analysis of climate data. ESGF provides a robust, distributed data and computation platform, enabling worldwide access to Peta/Exa-scale scientific data.  It is led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US.

CEDA has played a key role in the collaboration and has been involved in the design, development and evolution of the system since its inception.  It operates a Tier 1 ESGF node hosted on computing infrastructure provided by the JASMIN super-data-cluster, managed and maintained by the STFC Scientific Computing Department and funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

JASMIN Operations Manager, Matt Pritchard, said, “Environmental science has some big challenges ahead and the organisations involved in JASMIN are already taking a leading role for the UK in many international efforts to address these challenges. ESGF is a great example of this and the contribution of STFC expertise has made a real impact here."

Jonathan Churchill, JASMIN Infrastructure manager,  said, “The Scientific Computing Department is really pleased to be able to support the world-leading science that CEDA and ESGF have achieved on the JASMIN infrastructure, as demonstrated by this award. Through the tight collaboration with CEDA over the last 6 years, the architecture and operating principals SCD designed for JASMIN and its subsequent upgrades are now clearly bearing fruit on the International stage."

More information:

R&D 100 awards

ESGF

CEDA

NERC

JASMIN: Facing a data challenge like no other

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