Over the past several years, the Space Science Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been in the process of transitioning McIDAS to a client-server model using the Abstract Data Distribution Environment (ADDE). ADDE allows McIDAS users to access data locally and from remote servers. The ADDE model also allows the use of subservers to provide access to non-McIDAS formatted data (ie: NIDS, MODIS, netCDF) using standard McIDAS commands. With the latest release of McIDAS, SSEC has completed the transition of the majority of McIDAS functionality to ADDE.
The Unidata Program Center (UPC) distributes a superset of McIDAS that includes enhancements that make McIDAS a more useful tool for educators and researchers at Unidata member colleges and universities. These enhancements include routines to decode and access WSI NIDS and NOWrad, National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) and FSL Wind Profiler data, as well as user interfaces (F-Key menus and GUIs) to access these and other more conventional McIDAS datasets. Over the past year, the UPC has been in the process of converting it's enhancements of McIDAS to use the ADDE model. We deliberately waited until SSEC completed most of its transition to ADDE to avoid confusion between ADDE and non-ADDE access to data. Part of our effort has been to write subservers to access the NIDS and NOWrad imagery in their raw format instead of converting them to McIDAS AREA files. Another part of our effort has been to incorporate features into the Unidata McIDAS GUI that allows sites to easily switch between real-time and case-study datasets and also between local and remote datasets.
With ADDE, Unidata sites can collaborate on projects without having to move datasets between the institutions. One site can create products and make them accessible to another (or several) site(s) through ADDE. ADDE also eliminates the need to cross-mount directories through NFS in order to share data among machines within a department or institution.