20021222: access to pscwx McIDAS installation (cont.)

>From: Jim Koermer <address@hidden>
>Organization: Plymouth State
>Keywords: 200212222126.gBMLQrt16652 McIDAS ldm-mcidas FreeBSD

Jim,

>Things are going well, but it has been a very busy semester. We now have 
>nearly 90 majors and we're working out of temporary facilties until we 
>can move back into our fully renovated and expanded science building in 
>August. We will have some great space there. It's been somewhat of a 
>pain trying to keep our systems going, since we are keeping some of them 
>in the building being renovated, but things seemed to have settled down.

Sure sounds like this is keeping you busy!

re: access to pscwx

>We changed it after we had some questionable activity going on, so we 
>thought that we better change.

Makes sense to me.

re: upgrades

o do an upgrade to McIDAS v2002b

Done.  The big changes in this release were in areas that were
peripheral to your McIDAS use.  The ADDE servers for GINI images should
be somewhat faster after some code mods.  The big performance gain was
in the serving of the NEXRAD Level III data.  I found a big memory leak
that would cause systems with modest amounts of memory to slow down to
swap memory to disk.  The fixes really shine for large datasets, and
the ones you have in /huge verge on being in this group.

o potentially do an upgrade to the LDM

Will update as soon as we get a stable/tested LDM 6.  We are intesting
for this right now, so the wait shouldn't be that long.

o create an ldm-mcidas distribution for other FreeBSD sites

Done.  Thanks for letting me use your facilities for producing this!


>We did compile the new LDM and it's sitting on "snow".

Which version?  Hopefully, it is 5.2.2 which is only available in
a source release.  LDM 5.2+ contains a routine, rtstats, that reports
real time statistics back to us.  We make plots of the real time
statistics available under:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/chiz/latency/stats

The real time stats are _so_ much better/useful than the hourly
statistics that were reported previously.  We will be dropping the
use of the old statistics as soon as we can get the community up
to speed on current LDM versions.

>I wanted to get 
>it going several weeks ago, but ran out of time. I was planning to try 
>to move it to all systems (cyclone, pscwx, and snow) and configure it 
>several weeks ago, but too many higher priority items kept that activity 
>at bay.

I know the feeling/situation!

>I was hoping to get to it after Jan 1st. I will be away until 
>Jan 1st and I'm leaving for Africa for 2 weeks on Jan 13, back in 
>Plymouth for a few weeks, and then Long Beach in February.

Wow!  Busy, busy, busy.  Where in Africa?

>As soon as the roof work has been completed on our building, we plan on 
>getting an upgrade to our Unisys NOAAPORT system. The new configuration 
>allows you to pass data directly to LDM without buffering it via files. 

Excellent.

>As Dan explains, it's like a hardware transfer. At that time (late 
>January or early February), we'll probably move all the GINI data over 
>to "pscwx" which should greatly improve access speeds. Currently, the 
>NOAAPORT PCs are NFS'd to our other machines.

This really should speed up access.  NFS is a big bottleneck.

>I'm still waiting for UNH to get moving on our Abilene connection. We 
>started this process over 6 months ago, but they dragging this on.

Sounds good.

>Happy Holidays!

You too.  Again, thanks for giving me the access to pscwx!!

Tom