Community Newsletter
Volume I, Number 6, October 2004

Contents

 

Introducing the Systems Administration Staff

As you can tell by the accompanying photograph (larger view), Unidata's Systems Administration group is hard-working and dedicated to excellence with little time for frivolity. In the photograph at right, Brian Kelly (the new kid on the block), expresses his dismay at John Stokes's (center) antics, while Mike Schmidt (right) Group Manager, tries to ignore them both.

Mike, who's been at the Program Center for many years (~16), has seen dramatic changes in terms of growth of systems and hardware requiring support. (Supported platforms now number more than 22.) The systems group's contact with the community is largely on the back end: that is, users experiencing problems seemingly related to software, discover through the support group that the problems are, in fact, hardware problems. That's where the systems group steps in to assist in resolving the problem. In that sense, sys admin supports "support" as well as the broader community and the program center. Emerging technologies keep the group (2.5 FTEs) busy. Among recent additions are webcasting, the access grid, and grid computing for the LEAD project. And the scope of their work continues to grow.

Hard work and excellence are the hallmarks of this group, but they know how to have fun, and that's no joke.

Committee News

We welcomed new governing committee representatives at the October meetings and bid farewell to some old friends. Retiring from the Users Committee were Mark Laufersweiler (University of Oklahoma) and Michael Morgan (University of Wisconsin--Madison). Michael, Mark, and Anton Kruger (Iowa State University) chaired the successful 2003 Users Committee workshop: Expanding Horizons. Both Michael and Mark have been articulate in raising and supporting community views in committee deliberations and discussions. As noted in last month's e-letter, Kevin Knupp (University of Alabama-Huntsville) and Gary Lackman (North Carolina State University) are new Users Committee representatives, and they were warmly welcomed during the meeting.

The Policy Committee, meeting the last week of the month at NSF's Arlington, Virginia headquarters, said goodbye to Arlene Laing (now with NCAR/MMM), and John Merrill (University of Rhode Island--Narrangansett) who served not only as a committee member, but as an able, energetic chair for seven years. The committee recognized John's service by passing a resolution that recognized his "leadership of the committee... . His success at guiding the committee through landmark decisions and developments has been exemplary." Melanie Wetzel (DRI), who was appointed interim chair at the May meeting has now stepped into the slot vacated by John. Steve Businger (University of Hawaii), James Koermer (Plymouth State University), and Paul Ruscher (Florida State University) are new appointees to the committee.

Here are links to committee memberships listings: Users Committee and Policy Committee. Committee members are your representatives and a link to the Program Center. You should feel free to contact any one of them to discuss your Unidata-related concerns.

Software Training Workshops

The schedule for Unidata's fall training workshops were bracketed by sessions covering the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV). A "Webcasting" process was initiated during this series of workshops. The webcasts will be archived and made available on Unidata's web pages to be viewed at users's convenience. It's possible that the availability of these online sessions will allow virtual training for some users, thus eliminating the need for costly travel to Boulder. Ultimately the webcasts will be indexed to allow users to reference specific parts of the workshop that address their questions. Your comments on the webcasting are welcome; send them to support-plaza@unidata.ucar.edu. At this time systems staff have identified about 200 unique hosts accessing the broadcasts,.a significant proportion of which are international users. Presentations are also linked from the workshop homepage.

(The photo on the left shows students in the LDM workshop session. In the center is Marek Kmiecik of SUNY Research Foundation/ASRC. More photographs are here.)

Most years, the training workshops are fully subscribed, and this year was no exception. So it's worth noting here and now that the 2005 workshops will take place earlier in the calendar year, specifically, beginning the third week in July. Watch for the workshop announcement around the end of April 2005.

Software and Support Updates

  • LEAD. Developers are preparing for a demonstration of the latest LEAD capabilities at the Super Computing conference being held the second week of November. Several distributed LEAD testbed machines will be running as a Grid.Users will login to the LEAD portal, discover interesting data, setup and execute a workflow to decode the raw data product into NetCDF and record the metadata in a THREDDS catalog and into the myLEAD workspace. They will then be able to find their results in their workspace and display them in the IDV.
  • netCDF. A new beta release (made 14 October 2004) of netCDF-3.6.0 (netcdf-beta.tar.gz or netcdf-beta.ZIP) is now available with new simplified installation instructions
  • GEMPAK. GEMPAK 5.7.3 was released in early October. Read about what's new in this latest release.
  • THREDDS. The THREDDS group has been working to improve tools for automatic extraction of metadata from datasets and generation of catalogs. This includes making GRIB-1, GRIB-2, NIDS, GINI, and ADDE data accessible through the netCDF-java library.
  • IDV. IDV (1.1) was released on August 13th.

Contact: support@unidata.ucar.edu for assistance with your software questions or subscribe to an e-mail list to learn more about the software packages that you use or those you would like to learn more about.

Send comments to info@unidata.ucar.edu.

Unidata is sponsored by the National Science Foundation