Current Status of LDM/IDD/NOAAport

by Robb Kambic

The major event was the official release of the ldm-5.0.8. This included source code as well as binary distributions for all the UPC supported platforms. There are many users installing the LDM under different vendors of Linux and almost all of them are having problems. This has grown into a support resource issue. It would be nice to have an official memo stating the UPC is only supporting Red Hat Linux releases.

A LDM workshop was taught for the NOAA users as well as the UPC community. Both workshops were filled to capacity and the course evaluations were all very positive. The areas for improvements would be for faster workshop machines and more hands-on exercises on the second day. UPC held the NOAA workshop because of present and future benefits to the UPC community in the data sharing arena and possible exchange of forecasting experiences.

The UPC NOAAport ingesting card has been installed on it's own ingesting machine and new board software was loaded. The card is currently receiving all four NOAAport channels with almost no data lost. The work that needs to be done is to write a device driver for the card and the LDM software needs to be modified for the new NOAAport feedtypes.

With the availability of new data, the LDM queue size has increased to as much as 800-1000 megabytes. UPC has done testing with queue sizes as large as 2 gigabytes. The results are that the LDM does not function with queue sizes ~ 1.5 gigabyte. New LDM development will be needed to accommodate the larger queue size and a new LDM architecture to make it run more efficient. A effort to port all or parts of the LDM into java is being discussed.

A person was hired to be the main LDM person, taking on the responsibility to design and code the new features of the LDM. This person will be also responsible to handle the LDM support questions. This is similar to the efforts to handle other UPC packages, one person in charge of the complete package.

There are no major issues concerning the IDD. There has been network work being done in the Chicago area that caused increase latency problems and connection problems. Some of these problems affected the sites in the North East US also.


This document is maintained by Robb Kambic<rkambic@unidata.ucar.edu>