DMEFS: a Web portal for METOC modeling

The exponential growth in data communications, specifically the Internet and Web applications, is dramatic advances related to distributed computational environments. The Distributed Maritime-Environment Forecast System (DMEFS) infrastructure provides such an environment that focuses on METOC (meteorological and oceanic) models and applications. It provides the developer/user desktop access to geographically distributed high performance computational resources (both hardware and software), community models, distributed data servers, tools and utilities (visualization, grid generation, etc.), all in a collaborative environment via a Web portal. Its intelligent middle-ware, through a familiar Web browser interface, assists the user (a model developer or operator) with defining a computational task, mapping the task onto computational resources, and analyzing, as well as disseminating, results.