McIDAS-XCD Beta Administrator's Guide

System Requirements for McIDAS-XCD Beta Release

The McIDAS-XCD Beta Release software package was tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 Intel and is supported on RHEL 8.x.

McIDAS-X 2022.1 (released in December 2022) must be installed in the mcidas account according to the specifications in Chapter 1, Installing and Configuring McIDAS-X, in the McIDAS User's Guide. Be sure to include the directory ~mcidas/bin in the environment variable PATH when doing step 3 of Preparing the McIDAS Account. In addition, be sure to update the McIDAS-X modules with the McIDAS-XCD Beta Release patch.

It is recommended but not required that the Unix workstation running the McIDAS-XCD Beta Release software have the user account oper. However, any account used must be configured with the appropriate directories, links, and paths to run McIDAS-X. In addition, the documentation assumes that you are installing the McIDAS-XCD Beta Release software as user oper for consistency with the previous McIDAS-XCD packages. For more information, see the section titled Configuring a New User Account in Chapter 1 of the McIDAS User's Guide. If you already have an oper account on your workstation and do not want to run the -XCD package under this account, contact the McIDAS Help Desk at (608) 262-2455 or by e-mail.

The Unix workstation running the McIDAS-XCD software must have the group name mcdata which contains the user oper.

McIDAS-XCD Beta Release is designed to process data from the NOAAPORT data stream that is broadcast by the National Weather Service. The standard method for receiving this data stream is through the use of the LDM software from Unidata. The McIDAS-XCD Beta Release package supplies a containerized version of the LDM so the previous installation procedure of the LDM package is no longer necessary.

McIDAS-XCD Beta Release requires a multiprocessor machine. A minimum requirement based on MUG testing machines would be thirty-two Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4208 central processing units at 2.10 GHz, but the more processors and power, the better the system will perform.

In addition, the workstation must have enough disk space to run the McIDAS-XCD Beta Release software package and store its data files. The table below lists the approximate disk space requirements per day for each data type decoded with the -XCD package. The space requirements were derived from the NOAAPORT broadcast in August 2023.

Data type	Daily space requirements
* ASCII text stream	3,000 MB
* MD files (all types/schemas)	McIDAS-XCD Beta does not use MD Files
All GRIB1 and GRIB2 data (Includes CONDUIT data feed)	650,000 MB
All radar (WSR-88D and TDWR) products and stations	60,000 MB
All BUFR data	McIDAS-XCD Beta currently does not file BUFR data
* These data are generated by default for first-time installations. The GRIB, GRID and NEXRAD decoders are inactive by default.
NOAAPORT approximate total	713,000 MB (713 GB)

There is an additional static requirement of about 3,000 MB for other McIDAS-XCD Beta files including SQLite database files. The LDM product queue (default= 8,000 MB) also consumes significant disk space.

Remember that the space requirements above are approximates and are per day. If you save multiple days of data you must multiply the figures by the number of days for your disk space requirements.

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