ESGF_Testbed
The ESGF testbed is composed of a system of web and data applications that collectively support publication, searching and download of climate data - both CMIP5 model output and observations. Specifically, the testbed architecture is currently composed of the following applications (see Figure 1):
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A web front end running within a Tomcat servlet container, which allows a user to formulate a data search, and that presents the user with the search results. Currently the web front end allows the following types of searches:
- Free text search
- Faceted search
- Geospatial search
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The ESGF search services application, also running within Tomcat, which has two main responsibilities:
- Execute the user search against the configured back-end storage, and return the results. Having a separate middleware between the application front-end and the back-end storage allows to expose the search functionality not just to browsers but also to web service clients, it increases modularity, and it enables a more testable and secure environment which shelters the underlying metadata index.
- Allow publishing of data into the system by exposing multiple types of interfaces to the publishing clients.
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An Apache Solr search engine running within a Jetty servlet container, which is used to index and search the data metadata. The Solr engine is secured by allowing access only from the _ localhost _ interface, therefore it must be deployed on the same server as the search services application.
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The ESGF publishing client, which is run by the data provider to list and parse the data stored on disk, and to generate THREDDS XML metadata catalogs.
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One or more Thredds Data Server (TDS), which serves the THREDDS metadata catalogs and serves the referenced data via a variety of access protocols (HTTP, OpenDAP, WCS etc.)
Figure 1: architecture of the 1st ESGF testbed.
Currently the ESGF testbed is deployed at PCMDI, ORNL, NASA and NOAA. The corresponding web portal URLs (i.e. the web front end applications) can be accessed at the following URLs:
Please note that at this time, the ESGF testbed is only meant for demonstration and testing purposes, and does not support any operational services.