User Guided Modernization of Earth System Grid Federation Architecture and Services

Abstract:

The ESGF community has grown to more than 25,000 users, which demonstrates the great success of the project. However, this success has created new operational challenges for the ESGF team; for example: (1) to serve this expanded community, ESGF developers and the ESGF user community need enhanced documentation and hands-on tutorials, (2) the user community needs technical support for software enhancement requests and bug reports, and (3) ESGF tools must be updated to support scalable data access and server-side computing to keep up with the growing data sizes, new high-resolution models, and the growing numbers of users.In order to provide the ESGF community of developers with anonymous feedback on how ESGF can improve upon its core services the ESGF Executive Committee initiated a major review of the system in the fall of 2018 and we administered a formal user survey using survey monkey on June and July 2020. The results from the global user survey shed light on national and international projects’ user’s needs, and the survey results bridge the gap between short-term and long-term development and operation goals. The user focused survey responses helped us understand the community needs and contributed to the research and development goals of the Earth System Grid Federation. The survey included questions on the following topics: 1) Data access, 2) search interfaces, 3) data publishing tools, 4) Server side and cloud computing, 5) user demographics.

In this presentation we will summarize the survey results and describe how these results are being used to guide our proposed future work. We also hope that this will initiate discussions and recommendation from the workshop attendees. Our user community is diverse, users with academic scientists and postdocs titles make up ~50% of our user community. About 16% of our academic users are either graduate students or identified themselves as students. 20% of our user community identified themselves as governmental scientist. Working with new generations of scientists will allow us to get fresh ideas and insights that can be used to guide the design and development of new generation of ESGF data access tools.