Serving scientific data over the Web

Researchers at the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison has built a prototype data server and catalog system for accessing data sets generated by climate models. The output of a single climate model run might be large, on the order of hundreds of gigabytes stored in thousands of physical files. A number of modeling groups around the world produce and manage such data sets. Organizing, managing, and providing distributed access to this data is a significant challenge. Our prototype addresses this challenge using a variety of open-source software components and languages, including the Python language, the Medusa server, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories