[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

19990513: PC as LDM/GEMPAK/McIDAS machines

>From: "J. Christopher Clarke" <address@hidden>
>Organization: Northeast Louisiana University
>Keywords: 199905131631.KAA18868 PC LDM

Chris,

>       I just got an email for Robert Mullineux from the National 
>Balloon Facility.  He says that you folks are now running 
>LDM on a dual-processor PII.

Right.  We are running the LDM, a remote McIDAS ADDE server, and all
GEMPAK, ldm-mcidas, McIDAS-XCD, and netCDF decoders on the machine and
it appears to be keeping up nicely.  Not only are we ingesting all of
the NOAAPORT channel 3 data from the IDD, but we are also ingesting and
decoding all of the data available through the CONDUIT project (if you
don't know what that is, it is the high resolution model data that used
to only be available by FTP from the NIC).  This is a _lot_ of data and
decoding.

What we are not doing yet is providing wholesale access to the data by
NFS, at least not the McIDAS data.  One reason we are not doing this is
that McIDAS provides faster data access through the ADDE applications
that have been replacing the older ones for several years.

>Do you have any details that I could have?

Our dual Pentium II machines were bought through a company called
Workstation Direct over 6 months ago.  This company has offices all
over the country; we got ours through an office in Denver.  The main
reason we did this is that we knew one of the people who was sorking
there (he has since left) and trusted him (but he has since left).

The specs on the PCs we bought are:

 Qty    Description
 ---    -----------
  1     Full tower ATX enclosure w/230W power supply
  2     Intel P2-450MHz CPU w/ballbearing fan per CPU
  1     Dual CPU/dual UW SCSI motherboard w/4PCI, 3ISA, 1AGP slot
  1     104 key PC keyboard
  1     1.44 3.5 floppy drive
  1     3 button mouse
  1     32x CDrom drive
  1     32bit PCI 10/100Mb ethernet network card (3com 3C905)
  1     AGP Video card w/8MB VRAM (ATI XPERT@Work/Play)
  1     21" color monitor (KDS VS21)
  1     Assembly/configuration charge
  2     Hot swap drive kit
  2     9GB UW SCSI disk (Quantum Viking 9.1GB Ultra/Wide)
  4     128MB PC100 SDRAM (512 MB system total)

Total price for 1 unit: $5216.00

Note that these were robustly configured machines to say the least.
Also note that machines configured the same way are bound to be quite a
bit less costly right now, in fact, a recent requote of the same
machine shows that the cost has dropped over $1000.  We made our
purchase at least 6 months ago, and since then machines based on the
newer Pentium III are available.

>I am thinking about doing the same kind of thing
>and would appreciate your experiences and advice.

We are still gathering information on the machines's performance, but
after about two weeks I can tell you that it seems to be running fine.
The real question is how it will hold up in the 1-2 year time frame.

The other thing I want to caution you about is disk.  It is our experience
that SCSI disks will hold up under heavy load _much_ better than IDE
disks (EIDE, UIDE, etc.).  If you were going to be loading your machine
as much as we are now loading ours, then getting SCSI disks is a virtual
must.  It does bump the cost for the machine up considerably, however.

As for what operating system we are running on the machine, we are currently
using Sun Solaris x86 version 2.7.  On two other of these machines we
are running RedHat Linux 5.2, but those boxes are not running the LDM
and the various decoders.  At some point, a number of us want to load
one of those machines up with the LDM to stress test Linux.  I don't
know when that will happen, however.

>Thanks

Other sites are embarking on the same sort of "adventure".  In particular,
I have been corresponding with Debby Luchsinger of the University of
Denver about their imminent purchase of two 450 Mhz PCs for Unidata
use.  They should have developed some opinions on how well the system
works in several months time.  The other sites that I know are currently
using or thinking about using PC platforms are (no particular order):

o New Mexico Institute of Technology (New Mexico)
o College of DuPage (Illinois)
o Lyndon State College (Vermont)
o Plymouth State College (New Hampshire)
o Metro State College (Denver)
o New Mexico State University/National Scientific Balloon Facility (Texas)
o Western Michigan (Michigan)
o Rutgers (New Jersey)
o SUNY Albany (New York)
o University of South Florida (Florida)
o Millersville University of Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania)
o University of Costa Rico (Costa Rico)

I am sure that there must be other sites doing the same thing.

I hope that this helped somewhat...

>_____________________________________________________
>
>J.  Christopher Clarke                address@hidden    
>Assistant Professor  
>Northeast Louisiana University
>Dept. of Geosciences                     
>_____________________________________________________

Tom Yoksas

>From address@hidden  Thu May 13 13:45:28 1999

When I was at CIRA there seemed to be a consensus that SCSI disks 
WEREN'T better; in fact were worse for many situations.  I wonder if 
the problem is that the benefits of SCSI disk drives are more noticeable
when file size is large... and that certainly is the case with some of those
HRS files.

Thanks for you input on this.

Chris Clarke