[Go-essp-tech] cmip5

[Eric Nienhouse]

Dear All,

Thanks everyone for your thorough and thoughtful discussion on this 
issue.  This support request details a number of usability issues 
related to cross-cutting data discovery and access.  Much can be done 
now to improve user experience as we all collectively work towards a 
more robust system which addresses these community needs.

Please consider the following:

* Install/upgrade to Gateway version 1.3.2.  (This version addresses 
several frequent end user support issues.)
* Enable certificate authorization (token-less) at all Gateways and Data 
Nodes.
* Try out the Gateway 2.0 Beta and provide feedback:  
(http://search-esg.prototype.ucar.edu)
* Install the Gateway 2.0 Beta for federation testing and review.

It will also be of great help to our end users to work towards 
consistent DRS based file URLs, improved user documentation and 
providing services to support bulk download.  Much of this is already 
under way.

Improving the help documentation for certificate WGet access and adding 
Globus Online as a download option is work in progress for the next 
Gateway release 1.3.3.  This should be available very soon.

Thank you for your time and help.

Kind regards,

-Eric


Williams, Dean N. wrote:
> Hi Johathan,
>
>     I know this can be pain now, but we are working to improve the 
> situation.
> I was also informed that other on the ESGF team are working to help the
> data movement/download situation. This help comes in the form of Globus
> Online (GO) and Data Mover-Lite (DML). For example DML also supports the
> list of features listed by IPSL:
>         * support for myproxy-logon.
>         * simple data selection with model,experiment,realm and 
> variable etc.
>           in a simple tree search.
>         * multi threaded downloads,
>           NOTE: dml-webstart only supports downloading small files, 
> but the
> standalone version
>           supports downloading bigfiles with multithreaded support.
>         * incremental process (ie, downloading only non-existing files)
>
>
>     The features DML are working to incorporate are:
>         * manage datasets version following new DRS
>         * download history stored in a database
>
>
>     We will keep you and the community abreast of the new features as 
> they
> become available.
>
> Best regards,
>     Dean
>
> On 9/12/11 10:12 AM, "Jonathan Gregory" <j.m.gregory at reading.ac.uk> 
> wrote:
>
>  
>> Dear Stephen, Dean, Sebastien, Stephane     cc Jamie, Martin
>>
>> Thank you very much for your emails. I am grateful to Stephen and 
>> Dean for
>> responding positively and constructively to my email, despite its 
>> being a
>> list of complaints. I'll certainly out try Sebastien's program, and
>> Stephane's too if you are willing to make it available; it's very 
>> helpful
>> that you have written these.
>>
>> Best wishes
>>
>> Jonathan
>>     
>
>  
> Dear Jonathan,
>
> Thanks for taking the time to describe your concerns about the usability of the CMIP5 archive system.  I am CC'ing this to go-essp-tech at ucar.edu as I think your feedback is particularly welcome and insightful and deserves to be seen and discussed widely.
>
> We are aware of many of the shortcomings you identify; improvements in software and documentation are in progress that I hope will improve your experience.  However, our progress has been slower than we'd hoped and we are now up against significant CMIP5 usage which will inevitably impede rolling-out improvements.  We would have hoped to have the system more usable by now but we are pushing hard to improve the system as quickly as possible.
>
> You identify several user interface and performance issues with the ESG Gateway search system.  Our colleagues at NCAR have been developing a new version of the Gateway with an improved search backend that I believe solves many of your concerns.  I've seen a test deployment at NCAR and it is a significant improvement.  We at BADC will be deploying it for testing in the next couple of days in the hope that it can be rolled-out quickly for end-users.
>
> Another point in your feedback is scriptability of downloads and checking what is available.  We had hoped that the wget script generation feature of the gateway would produce wget scripts that could be edited to download different sorts of data by leveraging the Data Reference Syntax [1].  Unfortunately, although some download URLs contain DRS information that would help deducing alternative downloads, this isn't practical at present.  We are working to improve the DRS consistency of the archive that we hope will improve download scriptability.
>
> The other mechanism you could use to programmatically download data and discover new data is reading the THREDDS catalogs.  Every centre serving CMIP5 data is running a THREDDS Data Server [2] which lists all download URLs in a network of THREDDS XML catalogs.  This is intended as an internal interface so isn't well documented.  However, I think it is no secret that some users are doing this already.  You can find the THREDDS source catalog of every dataset in the "History" tab of the Gateway's dataset page or they can be deduced from download URLs and a little knowledge of TDS.
>
> I should add that downloading data directly from a TDS will only work if it is configured to use "tokenless" security.  This is the case with only some datanodes at present but should be fixed in the near term.  
>
> In the medium-term ESGF are planning documented service APIs that would allow users to query the system programmatically and there is a new P2P architecture in the works with more focus on scalability [3]
>
> Regards,
> Stephen Pascoe.
>
> [1] CMIP5 Data Reference Syntax: http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/docs/cmip5_data_reference_syntax.pdf 
> [2] THREDDS Data Server: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/
> [3] ESGF P2P Architecture: http://esgf.org/wiki/ESGF_Index 
>
> ---
> Stephen Pascoe  +44 (0)1235 445980
> Centre of Environmental Data Archival
> STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK
>