Executive Summary

The field of ocean sciences is currently faced with extraordinary opportunities for progress. Three interrelated developments now permit oceanographers to study the natural system with an unprecedented degree of realism: enhanced observational capability, improved numerical models and formal methods for linking observations with models. The impact of these developments on our understanding of oceanic processes pervades all disciplines within the field, as well as cross-disciplinary linkages between physical, biological and chemical oceanography, and marine geology and geophysics. Unfortunately, many aspects of these activities are severely limited by the Information Technology Infrastructure (ITI) available to the ocean sciences community. Ongoing efforts to establish modeling/data assimilation “nodes” within the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) are just one example of high-priority activities within which ITI limitations are particularly acute.

In 1999, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences jointly formed a Steering Committee to assess the immediate ITI needs of the NOPP nodes as well as the projected needs of the broader ocean sciences community, and to provide recommendations for how these needs should be met. The Steering Committee sought input from a variety of sources. The most important of these included: a survey of the ocean sciences community to establish current and projected levels of ITI use, a survey of supercomputer centers within the United States to ascertain current and projected levels of resource allocation, and a series of invited presentations by ITI experts from the ocean and computer sciences communities.

On the basis of its surveys, the Steering Committee identified several urgent ITI issues. First, ITI-intensive ocean sciences research is expected to require ten to one thousand times the current ITI hardware capacity over the next five to ten years, with the most critical bottlenecks occurring in the availability of cpu cycles, memory and mass-storage capacity, and network bandwidth. Second, significant challenges in the area of software systems also exist. These include the need to re-engineer models, and data analysis and assimilation packages, for efficient use on massively parallel computers; the requirement for significant advances in visualization techniques to deal effectively with increasing volumes of observations and model output; and the desire for well-designed, documented and tested community models of all types. Lastly, exacerbating these looming problems is the extreme shortage of skilled ITI technical personnel accessible to the ocean sciences community.

The Steering Committee considered several approaches, of both a short-term and a longer-term nature, to meet these needs. The committee concluded that the current shortfall in hardware capacity could be partially met through more effective use of, and communication with, existing supercomputer centers, in part to better articulate ocean sciences needs and the importance of its research. Additionally, in the short term, dedicated medium-scale hardware could be procured for research activities that require lengthy periods of dedicated system use. Despite the importance of these steps to partially offset short-term needs, they are inadequate to meet longer-term needs, even if the ocean sciences were to increase its share of the available resource at the national centers far beyond the 4% currently obtained.

The Steering Committee therefore recommends substantial long-term investment in ITI for ocean sciences. This long-term investment should be deployed in flexible ways and managed by a new entity, here called Ocean.IT (pronounced Ocean I T). This organization will serve four primary functions:

1. Improve access to high-performance computational resources across the ocean sciences. This will be accomplished by both streamlining the current allocation procedure for shared resources, and by the acquisition of new hardware for dedicated use by the ocean sciences community. The estimated hardware need is equivalent to a single “terascale” machine, distributed among perhaps three centers each with approximately 1000 high-performance processors.
   
   
2. Provide technical support for maintenance and upgrade of local ITI resources. Ocean.IT will provide consulting services to facilitate efficient deployment of ITI within institutions involved in oceanographic research. Staff will be responsible for continuous technical evaluation of computing and networking hardware options, will make recommendations on computer and software acquisition, and will provide guidance on hardware and software installation.
   
   
3. Provide model, data and software curatorship. Community models will be distributed through a central repository, with ongoing documentation of algorithmic develop- ment and improvement. Archives of key data sets and model output will be served to facilitate their use in research by the wider community. A library of diagnostic and visualization tools (e.g., generic tracer transport codes, energy and vorticity analysis packages, Lagrangian float tracking software) will be maintained.
   
   
4. Facilitate advanced applications programming. Technical support and training will be provided to allow ocean scientists to take maximum advantage of ITI resources, including parallelization tools and advanced software interfaces.

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