Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

A fascinating global ocean studies initiative helps best define some of the IT superlatives around big data, cloud computing, and middleware integration capabilities.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and its accompanying Cyberinfrastructure Program aims to provide an unprecedented ability to study the Earth's oceans and climate using myriad distributed data centers and literally oceans' worth of data.

The scale and impact of the science's importance is closely followed by the magnitude of the computer science needed to make that data accessible and actionable by scientists. In a sense, the OOI and its infrastructure program, a major undertaking by the National Science Foundation, are constructing a big data-scale programmable and integratable cloud fabric for oceanography.

We’ve gathered three leaders to explain the OOI and how the Cyberinfrastructure Program may not only solve this set of data and compute problems, but perhaps establish a path to how future massive data and analysis problems are solved.

They are: Here to share their story on OOI are: Matthew Arrott, Project Manager at the OOI Cyberinfrastructure; Michael Meisinger, Managing Systems Architect for the Ocean Observatories Initiative Cyberinfrastructure, and Alexis Richardson, Senior Director for the VMware Cloud Application Platform, as well as a co-founder of the CloudCamp conferences, and a co-chair of the Open Cloud Computing Interface at the Open Grid Forum.

The panel discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.