ABSTRACT
The Sequoia 2000 Project is a large-scale collaboration between the Digital Equipment Corporation, the University of California, and several industrial partners and government agencies, for developing new computing environments for global change research. The primary focus of the project is to develop solutions for massive data storage, data access, data analysis and visualization, and wide-area networking. These solutions are embodied in 'Bigfoot', a computing environment the project is building at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Bigfoot comprises 10 terabytes of tertiary storage supporting commercial and experimental file systems, managed by an extended relational database management system supporting earth science data types and operations. Bigfoot is linked to a complex of private highspeed local and wide area networks, running both standard and experimental protocols. Research projects are extending Bigfoot to couple directly to general circulation models, and to provide visualization, full-text retrieval and geographic information system capabilities.
