Need for a METOC GRID computing environment

Our nation has begun major investments of time and money into an Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) that will span the country\´s boundaries and integrate well into the international version, the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). Further, it has been noted that equally important is the need to integrate data management, model execution and validation, and product distribution into a modern framework or infrastructure. Everyday more effort is invested in numerical ocean model R&D and then for successful R&D models there is the transition to, and implementation within, the operational activities. In a recent report sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation, it states "The field of ocean sciences is currently faced with extraordinary opportunities for progress... Unfortunately, many aspects of these activities are severely limited by the Information Technology Infrastructure (ITI) available to the ocean sciences community..." This paper discusses the need to create an infrastructure, much like the Web, that spans the needs of the ocean community from R&D, through transition and implementation, to daily operations, and that also would support distributed collaboration, education and training. This infrastructure should also provide the integrating framework for data distribution and management, model and application communication, and product dissemination and quality assurance. Common functions would be accessed the same way and have the same look and feel wherever they are encountered within the framework and thus ease the learning curve, as well as the development and collaboration process. While this paper suggests, at a high level, possible technology to accomplish this, the focus is on the need for this common infrastructure and not on details of the technology to implement it. The primary technology considered is the "GRID", the computational power grid that integrates diverse high performance computing resources a cross a distributed environment. However, the GRID in itself can achieve even greater utility when integrated with Web and distributed object/component technologies.