IDD and NOAAPort

Status Report: October 2011 - March 2012

Mike Schmidt, Jeff Weber, Tom Yoksas

Strategic Focus Areas

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

  1. Broadening participation and expanding community services
    Providing access to data in real-time is a fundamental Unidata activity.
  2. Advancing data services
    The community-driven IDDs provide push data services to users an ever increasing community of global educators and researchers
  3. Developing and deploying useful tools
    The IDD is powered by the Unidata LDM-6 which is made freely available to all. Our NOAAPort ingest package is being used by a variety of university and non-university community members. Both the LDM and NOAAPort ingest packages will be bundled by Raytheon with AWIPS-II.
  4. Providing leadership in cyberinfrastructure
    A project like the IDD demonstrates how sites can employ the LDM to move data in their own environments.
  5. Promoting diversity by expanding opportunities
    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.

IDD Activities Since the Last Status Report

  • NEXRAD Level II datastream includes an increasing amount of dual polarization data as NEXRADs become upgraded. This has significantly increased the data volume in the IDD NEXRAD Level II (NEXRAD2) and Level III (NEXRAD3) data feeds.
  • Fire Weather products from parallel NAM model runs were added to CONDUIT on September 20. The additional products increased the average CONDUIT volume by approx. 800 MB/hour. The addition did not require increased LDM queue sizes on WOC or Unidata community toplevel relay machines because the peaks in volume for the fire weather products did not coincide with the existing volume peak that is dominated by global GFS model output.
  • Rapid Refresh (RAP) grids are scheduled to replace RUC2 grids in the NOAAPort SBN and in CONDUIT on or about April 3 (the transition date has moved over time)
  • Unidata has assumed a toplevel role in NEXRAD Level II data distribution. 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 now receiving High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) grids in an LDM/IDD feed from NOAA/GSD. The intention is to evaluate making these products available in a new (EXP feedtype) datastream from the Unidata-operated toplevel IDD relay node, idd.unidata.ucar.edu. The challenge in doing making the data routinely available is its large data volume which is thought to be on the order of 8-10 GB/hour.
  • The UPC continues to relay FNMOC and the CMC data model output directly to the community. FNMOC provides the COAMPS and NOGAPS 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.

NOAAPort Data Ingest

  • NOAAPort ingest has been functioning near-flawlessly since the NWS transitioned the SBN from DVB-S to DVB-S2 in April/May 2011. The switchover was smooth enough that end-users should have never noticed the change

  • The NOAAPort ingest package has been bundled with the LDM as of LDM version 6.10
  • Raytheon is bundling LDM-6 with AWIPS-II and is actively managing NOAAPort ingest at a variety of NOAA offices

Relevant IDD Metrics

  • Approximately 505 machines at 230 sites are running LDM-6 and reporting real time statistics. 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 650 downstream connections. Data input to the cluster nodes is now over 6.5 GB/hr (0.16 TB/day); average data output is approx. 855 Mbps (~9.3 TB/day); peak rates routinely exceed 1.75 Gbps (which would be ~18.8 TB/day if the rate was sustained).

     

    The following shows a snapshot by feedtype of the data being relayed by Unidata's toplevel IDD relay, idd.unidata.ucar.edu.
    Data Volume Summary for idd.unidata.ucar.edu
    
    Maximum hourly volume  14281.280 M bytes/hour
    Average hourly volume   9055.233 M bytes/hour
    
    Average products per hour     263654 prods/hour
    
    Feed                           Average             Maximum     Products
                         (M byte/hour)            (M byte/hour)   number/hour
    CONDUIT                3253.905    [ 35.934%]     6045.153    70664.545
    NEXRAD2                3006.657    [ 33.204%]     4078.456    58341.068
    NEXRAD3                1002.702    [ 11.073%]     1243.256    55681.727
    NGRID                   881.130    [  9.731%]     1646.430    17609.864
    HDS                     320.313    [  3.537%]      517.932    19305.068
    FNMOC                   262.610    [  2.900%]     1590.909     2325.455
    NIMAGE                  141.902    [  1.567%]      255.932      189.841
    FNEXRAD                  77.223    [  0.853%]       94.044       71.477
    IDS|DDPLUS               46.631    [  0.515%]       56.780    38488.341
    EXP                      27.351    [  0.302%]       60.356      343.159
    UNIWISC                  24.193    [  0.267%]       30.273       26.682
    DIFAX                     3.553    [  0.039%]       13.163        4.886
    LIGHTNING                 3.518    [  0.039%]        6.834      346.136
    FSL2                      1.770    [  0.020%]        1.918       22.591
    GEM                       1.665    [  0.018%]       22.355      231.705
    GPS                       0.109    [  0.001%]        1.263        1.045
    
    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 and Penn State (using funds provided by the Unidata-administered Equipment Awards program). The cluster operated by Penn State assumed toplevel relay responsibilities for CONDUIT data in early March, 2010.