The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) Peer-to-Peer (P2P) enterprise system is a collaboration that develops, deploys and maintains software infrastructure for the management, dissemination, and analysis of model output and observational data. ESGF's primary goal is to facilitate advancements in Earth System Science. It is an interagency and international effort led by the Department of Energy (DOE), and co-funded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Science Foundation (NSF), and international laboratories such as the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), the Australian National University (ANU) National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL), and the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA). The ESGF mission is to:
-Support current CMIP6 activities, and prepare for future assessments,
-Develop data and metadata facilities for inclusion of observations and reanalysis products for CMIP6 use,
-Enhance and improve current climate research infrastructure capabilities through involvement of the software development community and through adherence to sound software principles,
-Foster collaboration across agency and political boundaries.
-Integrate and interoperate with other software designed to meet the objectives of ESGF: e.g., software developed by NASA, NOAA, ESIP, and the European IS-INES,
-Create software infrastructure and tools that facilitate scientific advancements.
ESGF P2P is a component architecture expressly designed to handle large-scale data management for worldwide distribution. The team of computer scientists and climate scientists has developed an operational system for serving climate data from multiple locations and sources. Model simulations, satellite observations, and reanalysis products are all being served from the ESGF P2P distributed data archive.