[Egrants #IKU-542206]: 2024 Unidata Community Equipment Award

Hello Jake,

Thanks for writing about the Community Equipment Awards and I'm sorry for the 
delay in responding.

To address your specific questions:

1. Have there been proposals awarded in the past with similar objectives to 
ours? If so, how much support were you able to provide as far as
assisting with hardware selection and downloading and installing software?

There have been a number of proposals aimed at providing students with AWIPS 
learning experiences awarded. If you haven't done so already, you might scan 
through the lists of awarded proposals linked on the NSF Unidata Equipment 
Awards page (https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/community/equipaward) -- 2020 had 
quite a number of AWIPS grants, and the one made to the University of Hawaii at 
Manoa seems especially analogous.

While we can't select the hardware for you, we've had lots of experience 
setting up systems to run AWIPS CAVE (and also AWIPS EDEX, if that's of 
interest), and we're glad to confer on hardware selections. I'm copying folks 
from our IT group and our AWIPS development group, both of which likely have 
thoughts for your project. As for downloading/installing/configuring the 
systems -- we have resources to help you succeed in doing this, but we're not 
generally in a position to be able to do the configuration for you.

2. Would you suggest making any changes to our primary funding allocations 
(i.e., purchasing a suite of computers) that would still result
in completing our objective?

Based on your message, it sounds like you're looking to establish or augment a 
computer lab environment where students could run AWIPS and other tools. This 
seems like a reasonable approach, and NSF Unidata has funded similar projects 
in the past.

3. What more information about our program could we provide to better assist 
you in helping us craft our proposal?

It's not clear from your description how many students you're hoping to support 
simultaneously (i.e. how many AWIPS CAVE workstations). It also isn't quite 
clear whether you're hoping to set up an in-house AWIPS EDEX server, or if 
you'd be connecting to our cloud-hosted EDEX servers. Finally, it would be 
helpful to better understand your level of familiarity with AWIPS specifically 
and linux system administration more generally. 

I hope this is helpful. I'm cc'ing our AWIPS development and IT teams here so 
they can get in contact with you with more specific responses or any questions 
they may have.

With best wishes,
Doug Dirks
--
Douglas Dirks (He/Him)
NSF Unidata Community Services
address@hidden  *  303-497-8657  *  U.S. Mountain Time Zone

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: IKU-542206
Department: Support Egrants
Priority: Normal
Status: Open
===================
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