An international ad hoc group of climatologists and oceanographers needs to set up a system to analyze massive amounts of data on ocean temperatures, collected hourly by hundreds of ships worldwide

What types of hardware might they need for storage and processing? What techniques might they use to make their research more efficient and lower costs?

To store their data they will need a SAN. To process their data, they will need a supercomputer or grid computing. To lower costs, they could look at on-demand or utility computing, as well as multicore processors and virtualization.