Members of the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) gathered in Abingdon, England, on November 5-7 to kick off the redesign process for the Federation’s computing architecture. Since the original system was designed a decade ago, the number of ESGF’s supported projects and disciplines has grown and diversified. Furthermore, operational requirements are clearer for the ESGF to support an international federated archive of this size. Many of the ESGF nodes now have other functions beyond CMIP (the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project), and the landscape of data repository and science needs has changed.

Led by ESGF’s Executive Committee, the workshop team discussed improvements to the user experience, data repository and management, data compute requirements, and platform and system administration. This workshop concluded with a high-level roadmap for future architecture directions, which will be presented at the larger ESGF conference in March. LLNL’s delegates to the workshop were Ghaleb Abdulla (principal investigator and co-chair of the Executive Committee), Sasha Ames (member of multiple ESGF Working Teams) and Jason Boutte (Compute Working Team member).