The Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has established a Field Research Center (FRC) to support the Natural and Accelerated Bioremediation Research (NABIR) Program on the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Reservation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee for the DOE Headquarters Office of Biological and Environmental Research within the Office of Science.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Much of the nearly $2 billion annual climate change research budget supports grants from the Department of Energy (DOE), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and National Science Foundation (NSF). Some of the data generated by this research are stored in online archives, but much remains in a less accessible format with individual researchers. As a result, some researchers are concerned about the availability of data. GAO analyzed (1) the key issues that data-sharing policies should address; (2) the data-sharing requirements, policies, and practices for external climate change researchers funded by DOE, NASA, NOAA, and NSF; and (3) the extent to which these agencies foster data sharing. GAO examined requirements, policies, and practices and surveyed the 64 officials managing climate change grants at these agencies."

This report is the result of a study of networks and how they may need to evolve to support petascale leadership computing and science. As Dr. Ray Orbach, director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science, says in the spring 2006 issue of SciDAC Review, 'One remarkable example of growth in unexpected directions has been in high-end computation'. In the same article Dr. Michael Strayer states, 'Moore's law suggests that before the end of the next cycle of SciDAC, we shall see petaflop computers'. Given the Office of Science's strong leadership and support for petascale computing and facilities, we should expect to see petaflop computers in operation in support of science before the end of the decade, and DOE/SC Advanced Scientific Computing Research programs are focused on making this a reality. This study took its lead from this strong focus on petascale computing and the networks required to support such facilities, but it grew to include almost all aspects of the DOE/SC petascale computational and experimental science facilities, all of which will face daunting challenges in managing and analyzing the voluminous amounts of data expected. In addition, trends indicate the increased coupling of unique experimental facilities with computational facilities, …