Welcome to Earth Science on Grid

This page presents an effort to bring together scientists in the area of Earth Science that are interested in Grid Computing. It has begun in the framework of the European 'Enabling Grids for E-sciencE' project.

Earth Science

Earth Science is an all-embracing term for the sciences related to the planet Earth. It deals with the structure and composition of the Earth, its origins, physical features, changing aspects, and all of its natural phenomena. The following fields of science are generally categorized within the geosciences:

  • Geology describes the rocky parts of the Earth's crust (or lithosphere) and its historic development. Major subdisciplines are mineralogy and petrology, geochemistry, geomorphology, paleontology, stratigraphy, structural geology, engineering geology and sedimentology.
  • Geophysics and Geodesy investigate the figure of the Earth, its reaction to forces and its magnetic and gravity fields. Geophysicists explore the Earth's core and mantle as well as the tectonic and seismic activity of the lithosphere.
  • Soil science covers the outermost layer of the Earth's crust that is subject to soil formation processes (or pedosphere). Major subdisciplines include edaphology and pedology.
  • Oceanography and hydrology (includes limnology) describe the marine and freshwater domains of the watery parts of the Earth (or hydrosphere). Major subdisciplines include hydrogeology and physical, chemical, and biological oceanography.
  • Glaciology covers the icy parts of the Earth (or cryosphere).
  • Atmospheric sciences cover the gaseous parts of the Earth (or atmosphere) between the surface and the exosphere (about 1000 km). Major subdisciplines are meteorology, climatology, atmospheric chemistry and atmospheric physics.
  • A very important linking sphere is the biosphere, the study of which is biology. The biosphere consists of all forms of life, from single-celled organisms to pine trees to people. The interactions of Earth's other spheres - lithosphere/geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and/or cryosphere and pedosphere - create the conditions that can support life.

EGEE

Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) is today the largest multi-disciplinary grid infrastructure in the world, which brings together more than 140 institutions to produce a reliable and scalable computing resource available to the European and global research community. At present, it consists of approximately 300 sites in 50 countries and gives its 10,000 users access to 80,000 CPU cores around-the-clock. EGEE-III, co-funded by the European Commission, aims to expand and optimise the Grid infrastructure, which currently processes up to 300,000 jobs per day from scientific domains ranging from biomedicine to fusion science. The EGEE Grid infrastructure is ideal for any scientific research, especially for projects where the time and resources needed for running the applications are considered impractical when using traditional IT infrastructures. You can read more about EGEE on it's official homepage http://eu-egee.org/