AWIPS II for the University Community: Performance Testing at the Unidata Program Center

UCAR's Unidata Program Center (UPC) is working with the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the National Weather Service (NWS) to prepare the AWIPS II software package for non-operational use by the university community and private industry. To provide redundancy when used operationally by NWS forecast offices and NCEP National Centers, AWIPS II components are distributed and clustered on multiple servers, a resource requirement that is less practical for universities and individuals. Of primary interest is performance of the Environmental Data EXchange (EDEX) server when installed on a single server rather than clustered among four. The Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) which comprise EDEX handle data ingest, processing, and read/write access to processed data storage, but long data processing latencies have been difficult to avoid when these JVMs are run in parallel on a single machine. This presentation summarizes the progress made by the UPC to find acceptable levels of performance when running AWIPS II components un-clustered in a non-operational configuration, and ingesting data via the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) network. This work will help the UPC better provide minimum hardware recommendations to our community in anticipation of AWIPS II release following deployment to the NCEP National Centers and NWS forecast offices.