To facilitate large-scale climate science carried out in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), as well as the need for data-intensive distributed computing, the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) within the Office of Science supports the research and development of the Community Data Analysis Tools (CDAT).
The goals of CDAT are ambitious, with emphasis placed on the building of an open framework that enables communication and interoperability between disparate analysis and visualization packages through appropriate application programming interfaces (APIs). Building such a system has brought a diverse community of climate scientists, computer scientists and mathematicians together to enable commonly used software tools such as CDAT, VisTrails, ParaView, VisIt, DV3D, and R under one charge.
Institutional acknowledgement for the CDAT participation goes out to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Kitware Inc., Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The CDAT executive committee consists of Dean N. Williams, LLNL; Dave Bader, LLNL; Phil Jones, LANL; Galen Shipman, ORNL; Claudio Silva, NYU Poly; Berk Geveci, Kitware Inc.; Wes Bethel, LBNL; and Jerry Potter, NASA.
The CDAT team acknowledges and works closely with other U.S. agencies and institutions (e.g., NOAA, NNSA, NSF, DOD, and others) to help define and implement new technologies into the open framework. These relationships and interactions offer a unique opportunity to leverage major programs across agencies in the service of DOE science priorities.