IDD and NOAAPort

Status Report: October 2013 - March 2014

Mike Schmidt, Jeff Weber, Tom Yoksas

Strategic Focus Areas

The IDD/NOAAPort group's work supports the following Unidata funding proposal focus areas:

  1. Enable widespread, efficient access to geoscience data
    A project like the IDD demonstrates how sites can employ the LDM to move data in their own environments.
  2. Develop and provide open-source tools for effective use of geoscience data
    The IDD is powered by the Unidata LDM-6 which is made freely available to all. The Unidata NOAAPort ingest package is being used by a variety of university and non-university community members. Both the LDM and NOAAPort ingest packages are being bundled by Raytheon in AWIPS-II.
  3. Provide cyberinfrastructure leadership in data discovery, access, and use
    The community-driven IDDs provide push data services to users an ever increasing community of global educators and researchers
  4. Build, support, and advocate for the diverse geoscience community
    Providing access to data in real-time is a fundamental Unidata activity.
    The IDD-Brasil, the South American peer of the North American IDD operated by the UPC, is helping to extend real-time data delivery outside of the U.S. to countries in South America and Africa. The Universidad de Costa Rica is experimenting with relaying data received in the IDD to Colombia.

Activities Since the Last Status Report

Internet Data Distribution (IDD)

  • Unidata continues to act as a toplevel relay in NEXRAD Level II data distribution for university sites and others that were receiving data from the MAX GigaPoP that was decommissioned by the NWS. The other toplevel relay sites for Level II data are the ERC (Education and Research Consortium), IRaDS (Integrated Robust Assured Data Services), and Purdue University.
  • Unidata is receiving High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) grids (both 2D and 3D fields) in an LDM/IDD feed from NOAA/GSD. These products are available currently from the Unidata-operated toplevel IDD relay, idd.unidata.ucar.edu. The challenge in making the data routinely available is its large data volume which is on the order of ~8GB for the pressure level output and ~10 GB/hour for the sigma level output. The HRRR is being experimentally served at: http://lead.unidata.ucar.edu/thredds/catalog.html (.xml for machines)
    • Other data sets we are actively exploring with NOAA/GSD/ESRL are:

  • The UPC continues to relay FNMOC and the CMC data model output directly to the community. FNMOC provides the COAMPS and NAVGEM model output and the CMC provides the GEM model output. Unidata has provided access to these data for the past 8 years, but on a "point-to-point" basis. GEM model output was converted from GRIB1 to GRIB2 in January. The CMC is now relaying output of there new hi-resolution (15km) GEM model to Unidata.

NOAAPort Data Ingest

  • NOAAPort ingest has been functioning well since the NWS transitioned the SBN from DVB-S to DVB-S2 in April/May 2011.
  • The NOAAPort ingest package was bundled with the LDM starting in version 6.10. The current LDM releases is 6.11.6.
  • Raytheon bundles a modified version LDM-6 with AWIPS-II and is actively managing NOAAPort ingest at a variety of NOAA offices using the Unidata NOAAPort ingest package. Raytheon's LDM modifications are evaluated by the UPC LDM developer and incorporated into Unidata releases when possible

Relevant IDD Metrics

  • Approximately 540 machines at 230 sites are running LDM-6 and reporting real time statistics to Unidata. Unidata staff routinely assist in the installation of LDM-6 at user sites as a community service.

    A number organizations/projects use the LDM to move substantial amounts of data that do not report statistics to Unidata: NOAA, NASA, USGS, USACE, Governments of Spain, South Korea, private compaines, etc.).

  • IDD toplevel relay node, idd.unidata.ucar.edu

    The cluster approach to toplevel IDD relay, has been operational at the UPC since early summer 2005.

    The cluster, described in the June 2005 CommunitE-letter article Unidata's IDD Cluster, routinely relays data to more than 700 downstream connections. Data input to the cluster nodes now routinely averages about 15 GB/hr (~0.36 TB/day); average data output from the entire cluster exceeds 1.1 Gbps (~13 TB/day); peak rates routinely exceed 2.2 Gbps (which would be ~24 TB/day if the rate was sustained).

    The following shows a snapshot by feedtype of the data being received on one node of the Unidata toplevel IDD relay, idd.unidata.ucar.edu.

    Data Volume Summary for uni16.unidata.ucar.edu
    
    Maximum hourly volume  17903.967 M bytes/hour
    Average hourly volume   9582.558 M bytes/hour
    
    Average products per hour     247931 prods/hour
    
    Feed                           Average             Maximum     Products
                         (M byte/hour)            (M byte/hour)   number/hour
    CONDUIT                3109.129    [ 32.446%]     5508.893    70263.791
    NEXRAD2                1624.647    [ 16.954%]     2591.167    36151.930
    NGRID                  1330.851    [ 13.888%]     2275.660    20318.209
    FNMOC                  1129.902    [ 11.791%]     6434.368     2839.651
    FSL2                    989.430    [ 10.325%]     1555.097     1240.767
    NEXRAD3                 703.909    [  7.346%]     1069.840    61259.419
    HDS                     318.323    [  3.322%]      597.553    16219.093
    NIMAGE                  130.804    [  1.365%]      248.942      178.535
    GEM                      64.435    [  0.672%]      415.164      694.070
    FNEXRAD                  56.945    [  0.594%]       77.799       66.698
    EXP                      50.449    [  0.526%]       93.573      403.535
    IDS|DDPLUS               47.557    [  0.496%]       61.330    37956.140
    UNIWISC                  22.538    [  0.235%]       30.999       27.302
    DIFAX                     2.858    [  0.030%]       12.712        4.349
    LIGHTNING                 0.441    [  0.005%]        0.938      306.070
    GPS                       0.340    [  0.004%]        7.674        1.116
    
    Currently six real server nodes operating in one location on the UCAR campus (in the UCAR co-location facility in FL-2) and two directors comprise idd.unidata.ucar.edu. The cluster approach to IDD relay has been adopted by NOAA/GSD, Penn State and Texas A&M.