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Re: AWIPS II and EDEX/CAVE info



Michael,

Thanks for all of this info, much appreciated!

Pete


On 02/15/2013 03:22 PM, Michael James wrote:
Hi Pete and Kyle,

We are working up a proposal for the 2013 Unidata Equipment grants, and would like to base part of it around setting up a prototype EDEX server and CAVE clients to run in our computer classroom. I'm having some trouble finding information about machine specs for both an EDEX server and the CAVE client, and I'm wondering if you could provide some guidance.

What kind of processor/memory/disk requirements should we be looking at for an EDEX server? Would something like a dual processor Opteron 4228HE (2.8 Ghz 6 cores each) with 32-64 Gb RAM and a few Tb of disk space be about right? We might want to use this machine to also do some background image generation for maps for the web. How CPU/memory/disk intensive are the EDEX server processes on the machine?


The specs of the Opteron look good, similar to what I'm using for testing at the UPC. I have only two machines to test EDEX, one is 16 cores (threaded dual-quad core) at 2.27 GHz with 24 GB RAM; the other 8 cores with 6 GB RAM.

The difference in performance between these two machines is not that significant. most of the lag in the system when a high volume data feed is pushed through it comes from the EDEX decoders (as spring plugins for the JVM) exceeding their in/out limit, causing a backup in the message queue.

So those specs are around what I'm working with, and I feel like such a system is adequate to process nearly all of the relevant feeds and product types. The big question mark these days is can we tweak EDEX enough to process 100% of the NEXRAD3 feed and the high-res models on CONDUIT. A fix for this is not known yet, but from my experience with AWIPS II I get the feeling that the solution is not going to be "bigger system" but "smarter system".


Our computer classroom currently has several Xeon W3505 2.53 Ghz machines with 6 Gb of RAM and NVIDIA Quadro FX 580 video cards w/512 Mb RAM each, and some older machines running Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz processors, 4 Gb of RAM and NVIDIA Quadro FX540 video cards s/128 Mb of memory each. Would these be sufficient to run a CAVE client on each?

I think the low end of the graphics card memory that has been tested at NCEP offices was 256 MB, so the the FX 580 should be fine, but I don't know how well the workstations with 128 MB would work.



We have a total of 15 workstations in our classroom - would a single EDEX server be sufficient to host that many CAVE thin clients, or should we plan for more? My perception from the descriptions that I have been able to find out on the web is that most of the processing power on the EDEX server goes toward churning through the data and generating products for the CAVE clients to use, and that the CAVE clients themselves are not a huge tax on the server. Is that right? If so, perhaps the difference between a single CAVE client and several CAVE clients hitting a single EDEX server isn't that large?


You are right about EDEX doing most of the work, but the data sent after a request from CAVE to EDEX is contoured and displayed by the CAVE client using the GPU. The thin client is a little different, as it tells EDEX to construct the contoured image on the server and pass that back to the client, sort of like a scene graph.

Thanks for any information that you can provide.

Also, if/when the AWIPS II software can be made available to universities for testing, we would be very interested in participating in the test group.

Thanks,
Pete



I anticipate we will have a ready beta in the next couple of months and we can add you to the pool then. We ask all of our equipment award winners who submit a proposal including an EDEX server to participate. I'm waiting for a new version from NCEP to test in the coming weeks, and then more source code from the NWS-Raytheon baseline which includes a new grib decoder. I want to have that grib decoder optimized by the time we release the beta.

Let me know if you have any other questions about AWIPS II. Your hardware looks good, and should work well for AWIPS II if you have no qualms about running RHEL or CentOS 5 instead of 6 (which is being worked on).

Michael


--
Pete Pokrandt - Systems Programmer
UW-Madison Dept of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
608-262-3086  - address@hidden