Developing an infrastructure for the Naval Oceanographic Office Survey Operations Center

The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) operates a fleet of eight multidisciplinary survey ships deployed throughout the world dedicated to collecting hydrographic and oceanographic data. Leveraging commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) communication, network, enterprise management, and system integration technologies, NAVOCEANO Survey Operations Center (SOC) focused on the continuous improvement of survey quality and reduction of the time required to deliver products to clients. The COTS components include rsync as a file replication system, IBM MQSeries as a real-time message bus, and Computer Associates Unicenter as an enterprise management system. In addition, Perl is used as an integration language, and various web/visualization and database technologies are incorporated into the design. The SOC infrastructure was initially developed to support a continuous asymmetrical high bandwidth (2.048-Mbit ship to shore/384-Kbit shore to ship). It was subsequently adapted to support dial-up symmetrical low bandwidth (64-Kbit) communication links. This paper presents a technical overview infrastructure to be implemented into the environment in 2002. It concentrates on the COTS technologies that were assembled into a unified system, how the system was connected to the existing ship data acquisition systems, and information transport mechanisms. It also covers the use of enterprise management, network management tools, and Web and other technologies to make the information available to the scientists throughout NAVOCEANO.