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20000210: Equipment guidelines



>From: "Arthur A. Person" <address@hidden>
>Organization: Penn State
>Keywords: 200002101912.MAA23127 Unidata equipment

Art,

Sorry it has taken so long to respond to your inquiry.

>Any takers on ideas for this?  Or, should we just proceed with what might
>seem obvious?  Thanks.

Please see my comments at the end of of this email.

>On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Dave Fulker wrote:
>> 
>> --On Monday, 24 January2000 15:01 -0500 "Arthur A. Person" 
>> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>> > The PSU Meteorology Department is currently making plans for equipment
>> > upgrades and I was wondering if you could give us some insights as to what
>> > types of upgrades would be most beneficial to the Unidata community.  This
>> > would relate, I suppose, to directions in which Unidata is heading as well
>> > as ways in which our department could be of service to the community.
>> > Any information/ideas/concepts you could supply or pointers to web pages
>> > or other documents with such information would help us in our planning.
>> 
>> Art,
>> 
>> Your request reflects a very generous spirit, and I thank you.  I think
>> it's best for our "support" team to give you the direct answer to your
>> question, but I will give it some additional thought myself.
>> 
>> Best regards,
>> Dave

The question you pose is a tough one.  A number of things that could
help the greater community are basically ones of infrastructure:
reliable, high speed networking; support personnel for IDD activities;
etc.  NSF does not, however, considered these sorts of things to be
valid items on Unidata equipment grant proposals.  Rather, they expect
these sorts of facilities as a prerequisite to participation in the
Unidata endeavour.

There always has been and continues to be a need for "more able" sites
to help out "less able" sites in the community.  In practice, this
typically means that a site with better facilities (including staff)
lend a hand to sites that are struggling with data acquisition and
software use issues.  In the past several sites have gotten high marks
on their equipment grant proposals for offering to setup near term
archive facilities for data conveyed in the IDD.  To date, however, few
of these sites have delivered on their promises.  It would seem to me,
therefore, that a proposal from PSU that addressed near term archive
activities might be well received.

For some time now, the UPC has been investigating various "pull"
data-access technologies as complements to the IDD.  The two most
promising systems that we are working with are the ADDE facility of
McIDAS and DODS (Distributed Oceanographic Data System) from the
University of Rhode Island.  A stated intention to deploy either or
both of these systems and give other participants access to
PSU data holdings through them would likely be most welcome.

So, what sorts of hardware can a site purchase and help out the
community?  Review panels for Unidata equipment grants seem to look
favorably on proposals that reflect an understanding of current and
furture hardware trends.  In practice this has meant that proposals
requesting several/numerous top-of-the-line computing platforms are not
viewed as favorably as ones that include a well configured server
machine and several, less robustly configured workstations.  A
favorable mix of these two classes of machines is a robustly configured
Sun server and several higher end Intel-based PC workstations.  A
proposal that shows this kind of mix nicely is the one submitted by the
University of Illinois in 1998:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/community/proposals/uiuc.Proposal98.html

The proposal for the same year from the University of South Florida,
while being more modest that the UI one, also shows the desired mix of
machine classes:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/community/proposals/usf_unidata99.html

The UI proposal received some of the highest marks ever given by
NSF/Unidata equipment review panels.  If you do nothing else, you
should give this proposal a careful read.

I am sorry that this note could not be a quick shopping list of what to
go out and purchase; that is typically not the way that the UPC
operates.  For some schools, it is more advantageous to purchase
equipment from a vendor that has a "sweetheart deal" with the
University than to shop around for bargains.  I would advise, however,
that there are several computing platforms that do not share wide favor
in the Unidata community: Digital Unix, HP-UX, and AIX.  In practice,
this means that these systems, while being fine computing platforms,
are always closest to the top of the list for deletion of support
(because of finite support capabilities here in the center).  A current
trend in the community is the movment towards use of cheaper PC
platforms running systems like Sun Solaris x86 and Linux (we support
RedHat 5.x and 6.x).  Even our office now finds itself moving in this
direction.

For additional information on advice on computing platforms that we have
previously provided to users, please check out:

Uniata Home Page
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu
  Search our Server
  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/glimpsedocs/glimpse.html
    platforms support e-mail archive 
    http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/glimpsedocs/ghplatforms.html

I would use PC, Solaris, Linux, etc. as keywords in the Glimpse searches
offered by the last page.

Even though this was probably not exactly what you were looking for, I hope
that this helped somewhat.

Tom Yoksas

>From address@hidden  Mon Jan 24 13:56:17 2000

--On Monday, 24 January2000 15:01 -0500 "Arthur A. Person" 
<address@hidden> wrote:

> The PSU Meteorology Department is currently making plans for equipment
> upgrades and I was wondering if you could give us some insights as to what
> types of upgrades would be most beneficial to the Unidata community.  This
> would relate, I suppose, to directions in which Unidata is heading as well
> as ways in which our department could be of service to the community.
> Any information/ideas/concepts you could supply or pointers to web pages
> or other documents with such information would help us in our planning.

Art,

Your request reflects a very generous spirit, and I thank you.  I think
it's best for our "support" team to give you the direct answer to your
question, but I will give it some additional thought myself.

Best regards,
Dave