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[Egrants #BJE-488376]: Unidata Equipment Grant 2013

Hi Victor,

re:
> I am e-mailing to inquire about the hardware needs for a prototype AWIPS II 
> standalone
> EDEX server at the College of DuPage.  We are very interested in submitting 
> an equipment
> award grant this year, and look forward to continuing to serve the 
> meteorological
> community for years to come.

We have not been able to determine the minimum, single machine configuration 
that would
fully support ingest, decoding and serving of the breadth of datastreams in use
in the Unidata community.  With each new beta release of AWIPS-II has come 
improvements
in EDEX-related performance.  Just yesterday we (Michael James) were able to 
process all
of the NEXRAD Level III products being delivered in the IDD NEXRAD3 datastream. 
 The
latest tests (again, yesterday) suggest that all of the 0.5 deg GFS data from 
CONDUIT
may also be handled at the same time as all of the data in the IDD datastreams
that originate from NOAAPort (i.e., HDS, IDS|DDPLUS, NGRID, NIMAGE, NEXRAD3).  
Our
latest testing is bolstering our confidence that a single-machine "solution" for
AWIPS-II EDEX can be realized.

The following are the specs for the machine that is being used in these tests:

Dual quad core CPUs (hyperthreading will result in 16 cores being available for 
use)
24 GB RAM
RAID-0 raid striped across 4 SATA hard disks
CentOS 5.8 32-bit
Nvidia graphics card (don't know the model off of the top of my head)

Please note:  While we believe that a machine with these specs will be able to
handle the ingest and decoding (at least all indications point in that direction
currently), we have not tested that same machine serving the data to more than
one CAVE client.  

re:
> Looking at past proposals for 2012, we are getting a sense of potential server
> configurations for this request.

Very good.

re:
> If you were in our shoes, could you suggest a potential "best configuration" 
> for a
> prototype AWIPS II standalone unit?  We are leaning toward an HP model, with 
> LOTS of
> memory.

Lots of memory will certainly be important.  Fast CPUs and a lot of them will 
also
be important.  Finally, we learned that we had to have very high performance
disk subsystems to prevent I/O backup, hence we implemented a RAID-0 raid with
striping across 4 SATA disks.

re:
> Thanks for your help in advance!

I want to be perfectly clear that the system outlined above is not guaranteed
to provide the performance that will be needed to run an EDEX that can
process all of the data that a Unidata site will likely be wanting to use;
it is our best guess at the moment.

The configuration for a single-machine "solution" has been a moving target for
us and other AWIPS-II test sites.  We are hoping that the results we are finding
using the latest AWIPS-II release (v13.2.1) indicate that EDEX will run
well on the equipment we have been using for testing so far.  One of the next
things we will be doing is testing the same setup on a less powerful machine:
single quad core CPU (hyperthreading results in 8 usable cores) with
6 GB of RAM, and the same type of RAID-0 subsystem being used on our beefier
test machine.  In fact, I think that testing on the "smaller" system
may have started today.

I apologize for not being able to give you hard specifications for
a machine that will be guaranteed to perform adequately as EDEX ingestor
and server.  We are getting much closer to being able to recommend
the minimum configuration that users will need to have, however.

Cheers,

Tom
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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: BJE-488376
Department: Support Egrants
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed