Oceanographers and computer scientists will design cyberinfrastructure to link research institutions on land with several existing or planned ocean observatories off the west coasts of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

That infrastructure will be a prototype for the use and automation of undersea sensor networks -- both delivery of data from sensors and the control of sensors and networks from land -- and will assist in designing sensor networks for conducting research in other remote and hostile environments.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $3.9 million over four years to the University of Washington (UW), the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) and partner institutions to build the Laboratory for the
Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid (LOOKING). It is the largest of nearly 120 awards from the agency's Information Technology Research (ITR) program this year, which total $130 million to be disbursed over the next five years.

Participating institutions will collaborate on experimental wireless, optical networks and Grid technology, including development of Web services, networking protocols, devices and sensors. The prototype Grid
will eventually link communities of oceanographers via high-speed wireless and optical networks to observatories in the Northeast Pacific and offshore Southern California.

"Our prototype infrastructure will be a large distributed data Grid, driven by a variety of instruments, and we want it to be capable of interactively analyzing and collaboratively visualizing multiple data objects," said John Orcutt, deputy director of Scripps and LOOKING's principal investigator at UCSD. "One of our biggest challenges is the
design of middleware to facilitate and enable instrument and infrastructure control, data generation and distributed storage, data assimilation and ocean simulation, analysis, visualization and collaboration."

Working with other NSF-funded organizations, LOOKING will develop cyberinfrastructure to link multiple coastal or regional observatories, including the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observatory (SCCOOS),
which will provide real-time data from its existing sensors. New Web services, networking and control prototypes will also be tested in conjunction with several new observatories to be constructed over the next five years.

To manage -- on land -- the vast amounts of data streaming from these ocean observatories, LOOKING will rely on the emerging capabilities of the NSF-funded OptIPuter project. Dedicated lightpaths, or lambdas (individual
wavelengths of light on optical fibers), linking UW and UCSD will form LOOKING's optical core, with plans for eventual links to NASA research centers, institutions in Mexico and Canada, as well as other U.S. universities that do ocean research. Researchers at the University of Illinois will provide optical networking and visualization expertise on the project.

"OptIPuter will provide real-time software as well as high-performance compute and storage capacity," said OptIPuter and Cal-(IT)² director Larry Smarr, who is co-PI on LOOKING and a professor of computer science and
engineering at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. "The dedicated lightpaths will also permit super-fast, interactive control of ocean-going instruments along with real-time access to the data from those instruments."

Given LOOKING's focus on tools for research and education, Web services will be a priority at UCSD, UW, OSU, MBARI, WHOI and CANARIE, as well as CalPoly, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

Two other projects based at UCSD -- ROADnet and HiSeasNet -- will provide data-handling software and ocean-to-shore, high-speed wireless and satellite communication systems. International partners include the
oceanographic department of Mexico's Center for Scientific Research and Graduate Studies of Ensenada (CICESE).