In the spring of 2010, the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (DAES) at the University at Albany, State University of New York received funds from Unidata's annual Community Equipment Awards program to renovate the department's electronic map room. As a result, during the summer of 2010 our department purchased eight Dell Optiplex 780 desktop computers with dual-quad core CPUs (thus eight CPUs are available per unit) and eight GB of RAM. The machines were received too late in the summer to be ready for the fall semester, but were in place for the start of the second semester in January, 2011. Seven of the systems sit in the DAES electronic maproom, while the eighth resides in the Principal Investigator's office, for use as a development machine as well as an emergency hot spare.
The new machines have been a boon to the maproom's users, as the computers they replaced (2006-vintage PCs) each had only a single CPU. In addition to the performance improvement attributable to the additional processing power, the fact that we are now able to use 64-bit CentOS 5 and Windows 7 operating systems allow users to allocate more than the previous limit of 1.5GB of RAM to Java-based programs, such as Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer.
Maproom Software
Although the maproom is used by faculty, staff, and students, junior and senior level undergraduates are the heaviest users of the new machines. The students put a variety of tools to excellent use in local and national forecast contests, synoptic lab presentations and discussions, and class projects. Historically, Unidata's GEMPAK/N-AWIPS software has been the most widely used meteorological display and analysis package in our department. The new machines have been very effective in taking advantage of new features in the latest (6.2.0) release of the software. Students are also exposed to Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) during the spring semester when they take the P.I.'s computer applications class.
The maproom also hosts two quasi-weekly research discussions, one led by Dr. Paul Roundy centering on tropical-extratropical interactions, and another hosted by Dr. Lance Bosart where recent interesting weather events are explored from a variety of temporal and spatial scales. Discussion participants use the maproom's Crestron audio-visual system to display graphics from a variety of sources on the new workstations, from external websites to locally-installed packages such as MATLAB and NCAR Graphics in addition to Unidata software.
RAMADDA in the Maproom
Another key goal of the DAES equipment proposal was to enable sharing of data locally and externally via Unidata's RAMADDA server. The department's RAMADDA server was established prior to the funding of this proposal, and users can upload content easily with the IDV's Publisher plugin as well as view content stored on RAMADDA. Currently, output from the DAES' regional Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model run is updated four times a day and served via RAMADDA. Users are also encouraged to use RAMADDA to house their IDV bundles of interest.
Future plans include using virtual machine software to allow access to the Windows 7 operating system and applications from machines running CentOS. Removing the need to boot machines directly into Windows will enable students to run lengthy processes in batch mode without the risk of job termination when it is necessary to run Windows applications. As a result, it will be possible to take students through the steps of building, configuring, and running their own WRF models -- and sharing them in a manner similar to what is already done the department's real-time model suite.
For more information on the Unidata Community Equipment Awards program, see the Equipment Awards page.
