The call for new Information technology Infrastructure (ITI) resources and infrastructure has arisen from a series of community meetings, summarized in set of workshop reports. These workshops identified a number of computationally intensive scientific questions that would benefit by being tackled by well-funded, multi-investigator groups – data assimilation and modeling nodes – and supported by enhanced computational resources – a "hub". Several such nodes have been established and are funded through the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP). These nodes are undertaking a number of ambitious research efforts that demand significant ITI resources.

In addition to these groups, a growing number of ocean scientists have found their work hampered by lack of computer power, portability tools, data storage, and tools to remotely access data over a network. The demand for such resources appears to be increasing more rapidly than the present rate of supply of new resources. This translates into a general need for new and easily accessible ITI resources across all disciplines (physical, biogeochemical, ecological, coastal, climate and geophysical fluid dynamics problems and synthesis/interpretation of large multi-disciplinary data sets,.

Under the sponsorship of NSF and ONR, a planning effort was initiated in the Fall of 1999 to identify the science questions that can be answered with enhanced ITI resources, and what ITI resources are needed, to estimate their cost, and to provide advice on how such resources should be organized to provide the greatest community access. The membership of the Steering Committee was chosen to include ocean scientists with multidisciplinary interests and people who are cognizant of the interplay between modeling and observations. The SC has been tasked to seek out the best ideas on needs and methods of implementation from the broad community: existing NOPP teams, other modeling and analysis groups and individuals.