IDD and NOAAPort
Status Report: October 2014 - March 2015
Mike Schmidt, Jeff Weber, Tom Yoksas
Strategic Focus Areas
The IDD/NOAAPort group's work supports the following Unidata funding proposal focus areas:
- 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. - 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. - 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 - 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)
- The UPC has been evaluating ingest and relay of the 0.25 degree
GFS data that became operational in NCEP on January 14, 2015.
Testing has shown that peak CONDUIT data volumes would
increase from about 8 GB/hr to about 21 GB/hr if all forecast
hours for the 0.25 degree GFS were added to the current set
of products being delivered.
The increase in data aggregate volume that results from the addition of the 0.25 degree GFS and HRRR data from NOAA/GSD can be seen by comparing the volume on our IDD test leaf node, lead.unidata.ucar.edu with that on one of the idd.unidata.ucar.edu real server backends shown below:
Data Volume Summary for lead.unidata.ucar.edu Maximum hourly volume 44003.174 M bytes/hour Average hourly volume 21199.138 M bytes/hour Average products per hour 322785 prods/hour Feed Average Maximum Products (M byte/hour) (M byte/hour) number/hour CONDUIT 7756.879 [ 36.591%] 21449.892 91513.640 FSL2 3718.160 [ 17.539%] 7435.481 6485.200 NGRID 3523.378 [ 16.620%] 5434.958 24026.240 NEXRAD2 2878.497 [ 13.578%] 3605.088 53754.120 FNMOC 1146.801 [ 5.410%] 5302.426 3131.360 NEXRAD3 1075.070 [ 5.071%] 1262.917 79334.720 HDS 393.330 [ 1.855%] 604.352 19163.000 NOTHER 244.889 [ 1.155%] 735.924 1177.960 NIMAGE 152.517 [ 0.719%] 247.598 198.840 FNEXRAD 78.796 [ 0.372%] 88.861 104.760 GEM 74.915 [ 0.353%] 467.891 803.200 UNIWISC 70.412 [ 0.332%] 116.423 46.000 IDS|DDPLUS 55.050 [ 0.260%] 66.344 42427.640 EXP 29.312 [ 0.138%] 51.651 304.600 LIGHTNING 1.054 [ 0.005%] 1.707 312.920 GPS 0.079 [ 0.000%] 0.405 1.000A working group composed of User Committee members and Unidata staff prepared and distributed a questionaire that is primarily aimed gauging the community's interest in getting the 0.25 degree GFS data added to CONDUIT. Responses to the questionaire will be collected for review during the March User Committee meeting.
Planned Activities
Ongoing Activities
We plan to continue the following activies:
- Unidata continues to receive High Resolution Rapid Refresh
(HRRR) grids (both 2D and 3D fields) in an LDM/IDD
feed from NOAA/GSD and feed these products to a small number
(6) of university sites on hrrr.unidata.ucar.edu.
Since HRRR and ESTOFS data were added to the NOAAPort
Satellite Broadcast Network (SBN) in late September, 2014, continuing
to relay the HRRR ingested from NOAA/GSD is considered to
be of lesser importance and will eventually be discontinued.
The HRRR is being experimentally served at: http://thredds-jumbo.unidata.ucar.edu/thredds/modelsHrrr.html (.xml for machines)
-
Other data sets we are actively exploring with NOAA/GSD/ESRL are:
- HRRR and ESTOFS products were added to NOAAPort in late September,
2014. The following TINs announced these additions:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/notification/tin14-28hrrr-cca.htm
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/notification/tin13-43estofs_noaaport_aaa.htmBriefly, these additions are comprised of:
- HRRR: 81 products, hourly F00-15 each hour. CONUS 2.5km grid184. ~44 GB/day
- ESTOFS: 3 products, hourly F00-F180, 00, 06, 12, 18z runs. CONUS 2.5km grid, Puerto Rico 1.25 km grid. ~2 GB/day
HRRR fields and forecasts times that are not included in the NOAAPort expansion will be evaluated as additions to the CONDUIT IDD datastream.
- The UPC continues to relay FNMOC and 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
(15 km) GEM model to Unidata.
NOAAPort Data Ingest
- The NOAAPort SBN, which transitioned from DVB-S to DVB-S2
in April/May 2011, was upgraded to support much higher
throughput in August, 2014. Ingestion of the
broadcast as been working at the UPC since the upgade,
but we routinely experienced high numbers of missed frames.
Comparison of our ingest metrics with other sites running our software (e.g., UW/SSEC, NOAA/GSD, LSU/SRCC, and a Northrup Grumman office in Northern Virginia) strongly suggested that signal quality was a major contributing factor in the problems were being experienced. We expended considerable effort to understand the data ingest problems being experienced. Experimentation demonstrated that that use of an older version of firmware on out Novra S300N receivers (V2R7 the version recommended by the manufacturer for our hardware) would produce errors in the UDP output UDP when the S300Ns were interrogated for status information, and this effect was, in turn, a function of signal quality. This problem was verified by one of the commercial vendors of NOAAPort receipt systems who is currently working with Novra to correct this and other problems being experienced by S300N receivers. It was learned very recently that Raytheon was not aware of this problem, but they were aware of other problems related to the S300N receiver, and they too are working with Novra to get the problems corrected.
- Unidata's NOAAPort ingest package is bundled with current versions of the LDM. The current LDM release is v6.12.6, and v6.12.7 is being readied for release.
- Raytheon bundles a version LDM-6 with AWIPS-II and is actively using Unidata's NOAAPort ingest code at a variety of NOAA offices. Raytheon has provided the UPC code modifications and GRIB table updates needed to support new data to be added to in the NOAAPort expansion. when possible
Relevant IDD Metrics
- Approximately 550 machines at 245 sites are
running LDM-6 and reporting real time statistics to
the UPC. Unidata staff routinely assist in the installation
and tuning of LDM-6 at user sites as a community service.
A number organizations/projects continue 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 routinely averages up to 20 GB/hr (~0.5 TB/day); average data output from the entire cluster exceeds 1.3 Gbps (~14 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 real server backend node of the Unidata toplevel IDD relay, idd.unidata.ucar.edu.
Data Volume Summary for uni19.unidata.ucar.edu Maximum hourly volume 23982.273 M bytes/hour Average hourly volume 13282.657 M bytes/hour Average products per hour 297389 prods/hour Feed Average Maximum Products (M byte/hour) (M byte/hour) number/hour CONDUIT 3653.337 [ 27.505%] 8376.741 73213.320 NGRID 3523.492 [ 26.527%] 5434.958 24064.880 NEXRAD2 2863.788 [ 21.560%] 3605.088 53421.200 FNMOC 1146.801 [ 8.634%] 5302.426 3131.360 NEXRAD3 1073.337 [ 8.081%] 1262.917 79176.360 HDS 393.425 [ 2.962%] 604.352 19170.920 NOTHER 244.889 [ 1.844%] 735.924 1177.960 NIMAGE 151.668 [ 1.142%] 247.598 197.920 GEM 74.915 [ 0.564%] 467.891 803.200 IDS|DDPLUS 54.982 [ 0.414%] 66.344 42352.160 UNIWISC 39.047 [ 0.294%] 90.063 19.760 FNEXRAD 32.550 [ 0.245%] 53.054 40.480 EXP 29.301 [ 0.221%] 51.651 304.520 LIGHTNING 1.047 [ 0.008%] 1.707 313.720 GPS 0.079 [ 0.001%] 0.405 1.000Currently 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.