[RFC-004] Comment-7

Organization: USGS

I am a coastal ocean modeler at the USGS who has spent the last 3 years at the NATO Undersea Research Centre in Italy.

I am currently involved with a large (11 institution, 34 investigator) project in the Adriatic Sea in which DODS-OpenDAP servers is playing a central role in our scientific collaboration.

We have several high-resolution met and ocean models running with different grid systems in the same region and time, which have produced several terrabytes of output. To allow collaborators to this daunting amount of simulation data, we set up a DODS-OpenDAP on a RedHat Linux web server, which took about 1.5 hours. Amazingly easy. Then we just dropped the files onto the web server and gave collaborating scientists some simple Matlab scripts using a DAP-enabled NetCDF/Matlab gateway to work with the data. This is a password protected site at http://satlab.hawaii.edu/adria/.

We also have started to add attributes to the simulation data to make them CF Convention 1.0 compliant and point to the data with THREDDS .xml catalogs so they will work with the Unidata IDV. Several of the model sets have been done to date, which allows people to use the IDV to easily browse in 3D the vast quantity of data.

This experiment has been so successful that I have given several recent talks to various ocean modeling communities (the ROMS users group last month and the New England Coastal Circulation Modeling Community this week) emphasizing just how easy it is to start serving data (provided you have access to a web server running one of the flavors of Unix/Linux supported by OpenDAP.

The only problem we have had with OpenDAP has been building our own OpenDAP-enabled clients. On both Windows and Linux, we struggled with various problems with incompatible compilers and libraries, static vs multithreaded issues, etc. We eventually succeeded, but hope that things get simpler for client builders in the future.