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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a dynamic environment where a process can migrate from one host to another host, communication state transfer is a key issue of process coordination. This paper presents a set of data communication and process migration protocols to support communication state transfer in a dynamic, distributed parallel environment. The protocols preserve the semantics of point-to-point communication; they guarantee message delivery, maintain message ordering, and do not introduce deadlock when blocking send or receive operations are performed during process migration. Analytical proofs and prototype implementation are conducted to confirm the correctness of the protocols. Analytical and experimental results show the proposed design is valid and has a true potential in network computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]