Re: Antarctic IDD system

"Cayette, Arthur M." wrote:
> 
> Anne,
> 
> I found your e-mail on the web page and I am looking to get a cost
> comparison.  Could you direct me to someone in UNIDATA that deals with the
> hardware for the IDD/LDM.
> 
> Thanks
> Art

Hi Art,

It's nice to hear from you.  I attended the conference call with Bill
Kuo, Dave Fulker, and others about a week ago.  I recall that you were
going to try to come up with some cost figures.  Perhaps I can help you
- I develop, support, and maintain the LDM package.  

I presume you're interested in what kinds of platforms are supported. 
See http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/platforms.html for a list of the
platforms we support.  For simply running the LDM you can go with a
fairly low cost machine.  Many of our sites use inexpensive Intel
machines running free or low cost operating systems.  The LDM is not
particularly CPU intensive.  It can be space intensive depending on the
amount of data you want to receive and how long you want to to be able
to relay it.  Disk I/O can be a factor in performance depending on how
much data you recieve and how much of that you want to store.

Before I speculate too much, perhaps you would answer the following
questions for me.  How much data per hour do you want to receive?  Will
these machines be running other software, such as decoders or
visualization packages, or will they be performing other unrelated
tasks?  How much relaying of data would you expect to perform?  

Anne
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Anne Wilson                     UCAR Unidata Program            
address@hidden                 P.O. Box 3000
                                  Boulder, CO  80307
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