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19990507: Comments on USF proposal (cont.)

>From: "Laing, Arlene" <address@hidden>
>Organization: University of South Florida
>Keywords: 199905041654.KAA23614 equipment proposal

Arlene,

Sorry I couldn't get back to you on this earlier.

>Thanks for your comments.  I will incorporate the changes that you have
>suggested and  will be ordering PCs instead with Solaris or Linux.  
>
>- Do you have any suggestions for servers (configuration, speed, etc...) or
>storage?

I can give you the specifications for the three PCs that we purchased
for Unidata several months ago.  We recently took one of these machines
and moved all of our LDM ingestion/decoding to it; the machine is keeping
up with the ingest of all of the IDD NOAAPORT feed, NLDN lightning, WSI
NIDS data from 6 sites, and the CONDUIT stream (high resolution model
data from the OSO server (LOTS of data!!)) and decoding it into McIDAS,
GEMPAK and netCDF formats.  In addition, one can still logon to the
system console and work effectively!

The specs on the PCs we bought are:

 Qty    Description
 ---    -----------
  1     Full tower ATX enclosure w/230W power supply
  2     Intel P2-450MHz CPU w/ballbearing fan per CPU
  1     Dual CPU/dual UW SCSI motherboard w/4PCI, 3ISA, 1AGP slot
  1     104 key PC keyboard
  1     1.44 3.5 floppy drive
  1     3 button mouse
  1     32x CDrom drive
  1     32bit PCI 10/100Mb ethernet network card (3com 3C905)
  1     AGP Video card w/8MB VRAM (ATI XPERT@Work/Play)
  1     21" color monitor (KDS VS21)
  1     Assembly/configuration charge
  2     Hot swap drive kit
  2     9GB UW SCSI disk (Quantum Viking 9.1GB Ultra/Wide)
  4     128MB PC100 SDRAM (512 MB system total)

Total price for 1 unit: $5216.00

Note that these were robustly configured machines to say the least.
Also note that machines configured the same way are bound to be quite a
bit less costly right now, in fact, a recent requote of the same
machine shows that the cost has dropped over $1000.  We made our
purchase at least 6 months ago, and since then machines based on the
newer Pentium III are available.

The other comment I can make is that we have found that SCSI disk drives
hold up to hard use better than IDE drives.  Just to be fair, however,
I pointed this same thing out to someone from Northeast Louisiana 
(who used to work at CIRA), and he told me that his experience was
just the opposite!

>- Yes, I would like to share the archived data with the Unidata community.
>I have been making contact with other people in the Florida State University
>system and will try to figure out concrete collaborative projects that will
>utilize Unidata products.

Excellent.  Showing a desire to participate in the community as a 
"good neighbor" is important/useful.

>- Our department has a good GIS laboratory and excellent instructor and I
>would like to try to bridge the gap between the atmospheric data and the GIS
>data scales.  One of the big concerns in this part of the country is coastal
>flooding and storm surge. Linking satellite and radar data with the
>hydrologic data and GIS data bases would assist us in hazard migitation and
>planning.  This would certainly be useful to users in the Unidata community
>in other coastal regions.

Good.

>- We currently have IDL and will be using that for three-D visualization.
>At CIRA, I used their inhouse software to read McIDAS images into IDL.  We
>can do something similar here.

OK, that would be useful to note.  Without saying how you plan to do
3D visualizations, it almost sounds like a "pie in the sky" wish.

>- I will add the average student enrollment for the meteorology and
>climatology courses and more specifics about how the lab will be used.  The
>students in my classes are anxious to have a lab where they can do analysis
>and observe the weather in real time.  Some of them even wrote that up in
>their evaluations for the course.  In class, I have gotten permission from
>instructors at Penn State and UIUC to use some of their web-based material
>in class.

Very good.

>We would really like to produce material more tailored to
>tropical meteorology and incorporate some of the marine science observations
>and special GOES fire products as well.  The latter has garnered much
>interest since the outbreaks last year.  USF has a large percentage of
>part-time students.  Most of my students are working full-time or part-time
>in places like the Forest Service, Waste management companies,
>instrumentation companies, and the USGS.  My student who does prescribed
>burns is very much interested in further study of fire weather forecasting
>and use of new satellite products.

This sounds good.  I would include some details about how the machines
will be used in the research/education setting to let reviewers know
that your proposal is valid.
.
>- I will elaborate on the Unix administration expertise that will be
>available.

Sounds very good.  By the way, I want to warn you that the deadline
for the proposals is _next Monday_ (May 24).  We learned today (there
is a Policy Committee meeting going on) that this is a hard deadline.

>Thanks,

You are welcome.

From address@hidden  Mon May 17 10:26:51 1999

>I read about the passing of your friend and colleague Glenn Davis and just
>wanted to send my condolences to you and the rest of the Unidata staff.
>From the messages, he was an extraordinary individual whose life has left
>you with many wonderful memories.

I really appreciated your comments, and I will pass them along to the rest
of the staff (Don Murray already read your note and said that he appreciated
it).  We will miss Glenn in many ways here at Unidata.  First and foremost
as a friend, secondly as an incredibly talented developer.  It is just
so sad...

Tom

>From address@hidden  Wed May 19 07:17:26 1999

Tom:

Thanks for your advice and very helpful suggestions.  We should have the
proposal out of here today or tomorrow.  Dell has given us the following
quote:

1 Dell PowerEdge4300, PIII 450MHz processor with 512K cache $5,669.00  $5,669.00
1 512MB SDRAM (2x256MB DIMMS)
1 14/32X SCSI CD ROM
3 9GB SCSI Smart Hard Drive 7200RPM
1 1.44MB 3.5 Floppy Drive
1 12/24GB DDS DAT internal Tape Backup
1 PERC2/SC Single channel RAID Card, 16MB Cache
1 8-Bay hard drive cage

1  Dellplus, CD, RW, 4x/16x SCSI $                    494.95  $494.95
1  Dellplus Sheet installation, Red Hat Linux 5.2      $0.05    $0.05
1  Request per quote, labor, integration charge      $249.00  $249.00
1  PowerEdge 4300, 4500MHz/512K PIII, 2nd Processor  $699.00  $699.00
  Customer Installed

                                                        
10  Dell 6450 PII/MT workstation 410 base          $2,441.00  $24,410.00
  with integrated 3Com Fast Etherlink XL 10/100mbs

  256MB RAM,ECC, 1DIMM
  20GB Hard Drive, IDE (ATA-33)
  1.44MB 3.5 Floppy Drive
  14/32X SCSI CD-ROM for Linux, Precision workstations
  Mini tower                                                    
  8MB AGP Diamond Permedia 2 Video Card
  Ultrascan 1000HS 17" model D1025 TM color monitor
                                                
I am working on the Fast Lane submission right now and the Office of
Sponsored Research will send the cover information.

Arlene