Server and Laptop Upgrade
for
Metropolitan State College - Meteorology Computer Lab
Equipment Award Report
UCAR Subcontract Award No. S03-38811, May 2003
Anthony A. Rockwood, Professor of Meteorology
The Meteorology Program at Metropolitan State College has been a member of the
Unidata community and user of Unidata products since in 1989. Prior Unidata
Equipment Awards funded most of the Meteorology Computer Lab equipment. This
lab provides access to weather data that are used in every phase of the undergraduate
degree program, from large general education courses to senior-level research
projects. The computer equipment, particularly the server, was badly outdated
and no longer able to meet the Unidata recommended standards for data servers
and software applications. With less than 9 GB of storage for data, we were
unable to take advantage of new satellite, radar, and model products. It was
unable to run the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) because of its incompatibility
with the Solaris X86 operating system. Our proposal requested funds to purchase
a new server and a Windows-based laptop computer to expand the use of the IDV
as a classroom demonstration tool.
The equipment award allowed us to purchase a Hewlett-Packard DL360 server with
144GB of storage and a Dell Inspiron 5150, Windows XP laptop with 1GB memory.
In response to Unidata’s generosity, the College furnished the Lab with
seven new Linux workstations, bringing the total number of workstations to ten.
The award also prompted a new level of support from the College’s Information
Technology service, whereby the server will be officially supported in their
central server facility and the Meteorology Lab will be the first and only fully
supported Linux Lab on campus. InfoTech also installed the College’s first
100 mb network connection between the Lab and server, greatly improving network
congestion during times of peak demand. The server, workstations and laptop
were purchased, installed, tested, and configured during the Fall, 2003 and
were ready for the start of Spring Semester classes in January, 2004.
While the overall College enrollment continues to increase, the new equipment
has had a large impact on our ability to bring students into the Lab. The new
server allows us to store and access well over ten times more data than before.
All 88D radar sites with more NIDS products per site are enabled, rather than
a small subset. The NEXRAD 1km National Composite is coming in. All 1km, 30-minute
satellite imagery is now available. MesoETA and MM5 model grids are now being
ingested. Selected NEXRAD Level II data are being stored and displayed using
the IDV. Its greater processing speed means faster data access, less down time
and a better learning environment for students. We have been able to download
and store twice the number of COMET cases studies as before. For the first time,
we were able to offer a section of Introduction to Atmospheric Sciences during
the Summer Semester, 2004 with a fully functional computer lab component. For
Fall 2004 the enrollment in the Introductory Forecasting Lab has nearly doubled
from last year, and Synoptic Meteorology has a seen an enrollment increase of
about 40 percent.
More and more, the meteorology application of choice is the Unidata IDV. The
award also funded a laptop PC with the capability to run the IDV. It is used
to allow faculty to learn how to use the IDV and to learn how it can be used
as a teaching tool for a variety of classes. Students with their own laptops
have been downloading it and exploring its capabilities. Once they are familiar
with it, they can download it and run it in their own accounts on the Linux
workstations. The long-term plan is to make the IDV the primary analysis and
display application, replacing the current GEMPAK/Garp system.
