Cyberinfrastructure for the US Ocean Observatories Initiative: Enabling interactive observation in the ocean

Abstract

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is an environmental observatory covering a diversity of oceanic environments, ranging from the coastal to the deep ocean. Construction is planned to begin in mid-2010 with deployment phased over five years. The key integrating element of the OOI is a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure whose design is based on loosely coupled distributed services, and whose elements are expected to reside throughout the OOI observatories, from seafloor instruments to deep sea moorings to shore facilities to computing and archiving infrastructure. There are six main components to the design comprising the core capability container, consisting of four elements providing services for users and distributed resources and two infrastructural elements providing core services. The sensing and acquisition component provides capabilities to acquire data from and manage distributed seafloor instrument resources, including their interactions with the infrastructure power, communication and time distribution networks. The data management component provides capabilities to distribute and archive data, including cataloging, versioning, metadata management, and attribution and association services. The analysis and synthesis element provides a wide range of services to users, including control and archival of models, event detection, quality control services and collaboration capabilities to create virtual laboratories and classrooms. The planning and prosecution element gives the ability to plan, simulate and execute observation missions using taskable instruments, and turns the OOI into an interactive observatory. The remaining elements are the common operating infrastructure that provides core services to manage distributed, shared resources in a policy-based framework. It includes capabilities for efficient and scalable communication, to manage identity and policy, manage the resource life cycle, and catalog/repository services for observatory resources. The common execution infrastructure provides an elastic computing framework to initiate, manage and store processes that may range from initial operations on data at a shore station to the execution of a complex numerical model on the national computing infrastructure, and on compute clouds.