Server questions

[Jean Pierre Arabonis]

Hi Bob
    As i mentioned in an earlier e-mail, grads itself won't be demanding
on your server, however the datasets that you bring in can be large and
over time start becoming an issue for storage, small datasets such as
the wam output are around 37Megs and are produced every 6 hours, gfs is
in the order of 250 Mb and ocean data sets can be of the order of 500Mb,
obviously if you want to do intensive processes on these files your load
will increase significantly for the duration of the processing. I have
found that giving people usage of grads via perl scripts can lead to
heavy usage and slow things down dramatically, I would recommend that
you create your charts via scripts and save as png and let the users
browse those.
     On a side note commercial packages that will do what you want such
as idl or matlab are generally expensive, more tricky to use and
speaking from usage of idl, less stable than grads, they do of course
have great functionality that quite frankly is often useless with
weather data. Another package that you may consider that is free is GMT,
I've played with it and it has some great functionality (especially in
the map projections) but again bit more tricky to use. Vis5D is another
package, seems to have stunning graphics in 3D but I've never used it.

     Good Luck
       JP

Bob wrote:

> I`m still very new to GrADS and have barely touched the surface. I do
> however have big plans in the future, including producing some limited
> model products on my site.
>
> My biggest question at the moment is, what kind of server environment
> should I be looking for to even consider running GrADS on a remote
> server. Hardware specs are my concern. These may seem like dumb
> questions to many, but this is a first time for me!! I have visions of
> spending weeks, maybe even months learning how to use the scripting
> etc. Only to find GrADS will be bogging my site down, and crashing it!!
>
> Can someone shed some light on this subject. Hopefully you`ll see what
> I getting at!!
>
> What I want:
> Software that can run on my sites server, can import, ingest and
> contour model data into maps.
>
> Regards.
> Bob.


--
Jean Pierre Arabonis
arabonis at egs.uct.ac.za
Tel 021 780 1021 cell 084 401 1365
This email is 100% Microsoft Free

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