In the last 30 years, earth system modeling has become increasingly data-intensive. The Community Earth System Model (CESM) response to the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report (AR6) may require close to 1 Billion CPU hours of computation and generate up to 12 PB of raw data for post-processing. Existing post-processing tools are serial-only and impossibly slow with this much data. To improve the post-processing performance, our team has adopted a strategy of targeted replacement of the "bottleneck software" with light-weight parallel Python alternatives. This allows maximum impact with the least disruption to the CESM community and the shortest delivery time. We developed two light-weight parallel Python tools: one to convert model output from time-slice to time-series format, and one to perform fast time-averaging of time-series data. We present the motivation, approach, and results of these two tools, and our plans for future research and development.

Understanding the Earth's climate system and how it might be changing is a preeminent scientific challenge. Global climate models are used to simulate past, present, and future climates, and experiments are executed continuously on an array of distributed supercomputers. The resulting data archive, spread over several sites, currently contains upwards of 100 TB of simulation data and is growing rapidly. Looking toward mid-decade and beyond, we must anticipate and prepare for distributed climate research data holdings of many petabytes. The Earth System Grid (ESG) is a collaborative interdisciplinary project aimed at addressing the challenge of enabling management, discovery, access, and analysis of these critically important datasets in a distributed and heterogeneous computational environment. The problem is fundamentally a Grid problem. Building upon the Globus toolkit and a variety of other technologies, ESG is developing an environment that addresses authentication, authorization for data access, large-scale data transport and management, services and abstractions for high-performance remote data access, mechanisms for scalable data replication, cataloging with rich semantic and syntactic information, data discovery, distributed monitoring, and Web-based portals for using the system.

In the emerging world of Grid Computing, shared computational, data, other distributed resources are becoming available to enable scientific advancement through collaborative research and collaboratories. This paper describes the increasing role of ontologies in the context of Grid Computing for obtaining, comparing and analyzing data. We present ontology entities and a declarative model that provide the outline for an ontology of scientific information. Relationships between concepts are also given. The implementation of some concepts described in this ontology is discussed within the context of the Earth System Grid II (ESG)[1].