This archive contains answers to questions sent to Unidata support through mid-2025. Note that the archive is no longer being updated. We provide the archive for reference; many of the answers presented here remain technically correct, even if somewhat outdated. For the most up-to-date information on the use of NSF Unidata software and data services, please consult the Software Documentation first.
Hi John, re: > Yet again I must confess the courtesy and promptness of your responses > leave me smiling. Fortune 500 companies should have such willing and able > supporters of their products! Thanks for the kind words. We take very seriously the job of supporting our community. re: I sent a note to the LDM/IDD contact at Texas A&M > Great, We look forward to working with them or another member institution. I got word back late last night: "Yes, I'm interested, and I'll give him a call on Monday. I've got the bandwidth. I'll keep you in the loop so we can make sure the community can see the benefits." So, you should receive a phone call tomorrow (Monday) or the day after. If you don't please let me know and I will follow-up. re: ground-based truth product for severe weather events > This project has been on the drawing board for the past 4 years, and we > finally accepted a programming bid on January 24th. We hope to move it > forward quickly. This could allow our beta-testing to begin in the mid > to late spring Storm Season if all goes well (fingers crossed) Sounds great! re: system needed to run the LDM > Our servers are all hosted off-site (out of office). The "heavy hitters" of > are servers are VPS and are incredible at their process ability. > > Two questions with the type of setup we have. (first sounds silly, but I > must ask). > > 1) Are their any special issues with using the LDM to capture the IDD at the > remote server location but doing the processing (in office) on one of our > local > machines by tapping the data on the server? This would take a huge load off > of our > server and keep it from dragging down on decoding. No, but you would lose the benefit of being able to kick off processing upon receipt of a particular product of interest. This event-driven processing is one of the big benefits of using the LDM. You could, of course, kick off processing on a remote machine using RPC or some other event notification. > 2) Since this is a fairly "unique" software and configuration setup, are > there people available who could assist in the install of the system. While > I know Unidata offers no "official" support of the software, are their people > out there who are familiar enough with the system that could help in the > install > (perhaps for compensation)? Doing a first-time installation of the LDM should take no more than a half hour assuming, of course, that the person doing the installation is familiar with *nix and has 'root' privilege (one part of the configuration of the LDM requires 'root' to configure use of syslogd; another requires 'root' privilege to set the setuid bit on two executables created in the build. Upgrades of the LDM take on the order of 5 minutes. Configuration of what to do upon receipt of products is what takes more time depending on what a user's objectives are. re: > We will need to review our bandwidth issues with each individual product > selection. Is there a place to review (typical) throughput information on > each data product? Not on each data product, but there is good information in our real time statistics pages on how much data is available for every IDD feed. For instance, check out: Unidata HomePage http://www.unidata.ucar.edu IDD http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idd Real-Time IDD statistics http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idd/rtstats/ Statistics by Host http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/rtstats/siteindex idd.unidata.ucar.edu http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/rtstats/siteindex?idd.unidata.ucar.edu Cumulative volume summary http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/rtstats/rtstats_summary_volume?idd.unidata.ucar.edu This gives a list of the data flowing into the toplevel IDD relay node that we maintain here in UCAR, idd.unidata.ucar.edu: Data Volume Summary for idd.unidata.ucar.edu Maximum hourly volume 7309.435 M bytes/hour Average hourly volume 3400.194 M bytes/hour Average products per hour 161787 prods/hour Feed Average Maximum Products (M byte/hour) (M byte/hour) number/hour CONDUIT 1706.259 [ 50.181%] 4935.786 50142.348 NGRID 643.945 [ 18.938%] 1129.108 15504.348 NEXRAD2 434.530 [ 12.780%] 544.767 30075.261 HDS 215.287 [ 6.332%] 437.078 17998.674 NIMAGE 149.144 [ 4.386%] 227.037 196.391 NEXRAD3 87.371 [ 2.570%] 102.932 18266.652 FNEXRAD 80.745 [ 2.375%] 89.485 68.326 IDS|DDPLUS 31.306 [ 0.921%] 38.147 29135.978 EXP 22.677 [ 0.667%] 29.569 339.913 UNIWISC 22.499 [ 0.662%] 27.284 20.826 DIFAX 4.396 [ 0.129%] 21.193 6.065 FSL2 2.033 [ 0.060%] 2.134 22.304 LIGHTNING 0.001 [ 0.000%] 0.004 9.696 As you can see, if one got all un-restricted IDD feeds, one would be getting up to 7.3 GB/hr of data. > Right now we use 1TB of data throughput, but if we would be taxing that with > the total number of data-feeds selected, then we would trim a bit. 1 TB -- one terabyte? Are you referring to disk storage or Internet bandwidth? For reference, UCAR has a 10 Gbps connection to I2, and I think that Texas A&M does also. re: > Look forward to sharing our new data with the community later this year if > we can jump through our own little set of hoops at our end. Sounds great. We will be very interested in seeing how this all evolves. By the way, I won't be at the office on Monday or Tuesday of this week -- 'tis skiing time in the Colorado Rockies :-) Cheers, Tom -- **************************************************************************** Unidata User Support UCAR Unidata Program (303) 497-8642 P.O. Box 3000 address@hidden Boulder, CO 80307 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unidata HomePage http://www.unidata.ucar.edu **************************************************************************** Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: FLO-999289 Department: Support IDD Priority: Normal Status: Closed