McIDAS-V Coordinating Committee - Thursday, September 7, 2006

Present:   Tom Achtor, Tom Whittaker, Tom Rink, Becky Schaffer, Dee Wade, Kathy Strabala
Absent:   Matt Lazzara
Guest: Dave Santek

Tom A -
Goal of the Committee - To provide input to the direction of McIDAS-V
Members -
Tom Whittaker and Tom Rink - Lead Programmers, "leading by writing excellent code"
Tom Achtor and Becky Schaffer - Program Managers, organizing priorities for each P.I.
Dee Wade - representing the McIDAS Users' Group, which is currently providing about half of the funding
Kathy Strabala and Matt Lazzara - representing users in the scientific community

"We can't force people to use McIDAS-V, we need to convince people to use it"


Tom W -
From reading through the responses from the current McIDAS users, in addition to being able to run jobs in the background, most requests could be lumped into the categories of data fusion and data formats.  They also need indefinite support of the McIDAS library.   Becky and Dave interjected that there are sites with a million lines of user code, which would be pretty difficult to replace/convert. 
Tom also noted that many users are looking at this as a replacement to McIDAS-X.   We need to remember that "McIDAS-V =  new stuff + some of McIDAS-X" - not a complete replacement of McIDAS-X.  Things like running a session with 500 images may never happen.
Many users requested functionality associated with satellite and model data, but aside from users in our building, nobody mentioned conventional or text data.   Dee pointed out that the response was not a cross-section of our users and that only SSEC scientists and operational sites responded (NASA-Langley, JSC, Australia BOM, Cape Canaveral Forecast Facility, Spain, and ESPC [formerly SATEPS]).  Conventional and text data probably is important to other users that did not respond to the survey, or possibly just not in the Top 5 functions that users are looking for.

Kathy -
We need to remember that new data formats should be easy to integrate, and that hyperspectral data is very important.

Tom W - Input from different P.I.s
Bob  Knutson has a chained processing stream and would like to be able to stop and look at any step in the process.
Chris Velden wants to be able to look at vectors in 3D.
HYDRA should be incorporated into McIDAS-V.

Dave -
We need to make sure that this is easy to install.
Reiterated Kathy's point that this should work well with hyperspectral data.

Kathy -
One thing that McIDAS does very well is that it is easy for scripting.  You can send a user the necessary binaries and a script that can create a product or do a very specific job.   The ability to create a standalone package is something that McIDAS does very well that other packages can not do.

Becky - summary of MUG responses
Keep all McIDAS-X functionality (agrees with TomW's data formats and data fusion)
Maintain the McIDAS library indefinitely
Running processes in the background and on machines with no graphics card
Several users on same machine
Many frames

Dee - MUG priorities
Easy installation
Improved bridge for both graphics and images (TomA and Dave discussed different ways of importing graphics, so that things like zooming of graphics works better)
Improved GUI

Tom A -
One duty of this committee is to gather the priorities from the different P.I.s and to prioritize the entire list.   We will need to divide each priority into individual tasks and assign those tasks to programmers.  TomW suggested coming up with a method of  submitting progress reports.   TomA mentioned that the GOES-R project has a way of doing this and that we should look into what they're doing.
Future Meetings - we will try to reserve meeting rooms for the 2nd Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. for the McIDAS-V team meeting, and the 4th Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. for the McIDAS-V coordinating committee.  TomW will create a mc-v-cc email list for the committee.

TO DO: 
Reserve meeting rooms for future meetings  (TomA and Becky)
Create a mc-v-cc email list for this committee (TomW)
Meet with Bill Bellon to create a way for tracking the progress reports to present at the next meeting (TomA and Becky)
Have priority lists from each P.I. ready for the next meeting, so that the list can be prioritized (TomA, TomW, TomR and Becky)


NEXT MEETINGS:
Coordinating Committee
- Wednesday, September 20th - 10 a.m. in Room 351
- Wednesday, October 25th - 10:30 a.m. in Room 351
McIDAS-V Team - Wednesday, October 11th - 10 a.m. in Room 351