Status Report: Community Equipment Awards

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation

April 2016 - September 2016

Admin Group

The NSF provides the Unidata Program Center up to $100k in equipment grant funds each year. In alignment with the Unidata 2018 proposal, the Equipment Awards Program is designed to broaden participation and promote the use of Unidata tools and systems (e.g., THREDDS, NetCDF, IDV, GIS connections) to support education and research on various aspects of climate studies (e.g., diagnostics, change and impacts), by providing grants to be used in the procurement of new computers and equipment including upgrades to existing classroom and laboratory equipment.

This year, special consideration was given to proposals that included one or more of the following:

• Installation of a prototype AWIPS II standalone EDEX server and CAVE client, coupled with the Unidata LDM, to test data ingest and display both locally, and using the CAVE thin client to connect to remote servers
• Implementation of or pilot projects with remotely-accessible storage systems for geoscience data (“cloud-based storage”)
• Implementation of or pilot projects with remote server-based data analysis or visualization systems (“cloud-based analysis”)
• Installation of a Jupyter notebook server in the cloud (e.g. JupyterHub or Wakari, but not limited to these) to experiment with the use of Python for cloud-based, data-proximate analysis and visualization

A Request for Proposals was sent out on December 2, 2015 with a March 25, 2016 submission deadline. The Review Panel met on April 12 at the Unidata Program Center and recommended that the following proposals be awarded:

• Oregon State University, Karen Shell, A Jupyter Server for the Oregon State University Climate Science Program, Proposal 
• University of North Dakota, Gretchen Mullendore, UND Big Weather Web: Distributed Date Solutions, Proposal 
• University of Louisiana at Monroe, Todd Murphy, AWIPS-II Infrastructure Upgrade at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, Proposal 
• Pennsylvania State University, Chuck Pavloski, A Prototype Cloud-Based Visualization System for Unidata Applications, Proposal 
• University of Iowa, Bong Chul Seo, A Pilot Project for Cloud-Based NEXRAD Data Processing, Analysis, and Visualization for Flood Forecasting and Water Resources Management, Proposal 

Congratulations to all of the recipients and a special thank you to the Review Panel and the NSF for making the Equipment Awards program possible.

Areas for Committee Feedback

We are requesting your feedback on the following topics:

1. Possible theme(s) for the 2017 Unidata Community Equipment Awards;
   
2. Three volunteers from Users Comm to serve on the 2017 Review Panel;

3. Suggestions from previous panel members on how to improve the program

Relevant Metrics

Since taking over the management and administration of the Equipment Awards program in 2003 on behalf of the NSF, Unidata has made 87 awards totaling close to $1,100,000.

Prepared September 2016