cc: DAARWG.NCDC@noaa.gov, Tom Adang , Rick.Vizbulis@noaa.gov date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:26:22 -0500 from: "Bruce A. Wielicki" subject: Re: Teleconference summary to: Ferris Webster Ferris et al: Sorry I missed this telecon but I read through the minutes. I agree with the summary but with one serious concern: the document attached summarized: At the moment, CLASS is still focused on large arrays. It must evolve into an enterprise solution. To achieve that, an enterprise statement of requirements must be developed, rather than simply organizational statements of requirements. Since the original motivation or CLASS was making NOAA able to handle new large data storage commitments like NPOESS, I am puzzled on why CLASS should be expanded to an enterprise solution for all NOAA data sets. We clearly saw that the diversity of NOAA types of data is shockingly diverse. Developing a one-size-fits-all "enterprise" solution seems like the wrong way to go. It is likely to be very expensive, very complex, very inflexible, and will please no one. Since the original congressional logic was dealing with new large data volumes: it seems to me that the focus of CLASS on large data sets makes perfect sense. As the "Death March" book reminds us: 80% of the functionality comes from 20% of the requirements. Pick the big new problem (NPOESS) and do it right. It won't be well suited to fish guts data or to individual surface site temperature records: and thats a GOOD thing. From the outside it looks like CLASS is way underfunded in NOAA to even do that one thing: large satellite data sets. If that was the original motivation, and that is the tallest pole, and funding is very tight: there are only two things to do: spend all the money on a glorious architecture that will never be built (death march), or triage the requirements down to the really critical thing that must be done. If CLASS is successful, build on and extend it. I think congress is leading noaa down the death march path of requiring way to much for way too little time or resources. For any of you that have not read this book: I highly recommend it (an easy find on amazon and a used paperback copy is cheap). Lots of that rare common sense stuff. After living through EOS, EOSDIS, and CERES with ~ a million lines of code, I can confirm his conclusions. Given that CLASS is trying first to do new large NPOESS satellite data sets: I'm rather shocked to hear nothing about using lessons learned from the NASA EOS satellite system which is flying instruments with very similar data rates, volumes, data products, and users (from science to commercial). The Terra mission alone in 2006 delivered about 12 million data files to 25,000 unique users. The CERES data products on Terra alone in 2006 shipped out 40,000 Gbytes of data products to users. The IPCC policymaker summary has just come out. The full report is later this spring. The NRC Decadal Study has just come out. Climate change and the global data sets needed to support it are going to increase in importance. This panel should be comfortable that CLASS will be ready to catch the huge ball called NPOESS and be able to serve it up in nice sized chunks to the user community. This should be priority 1 for this panel to verify as something on track. I don't see it yet. I'm hoping I just missed it because I missed the telecon. Is that it? cheers bruce At 3:58 PM -0500 2/14/07, Ferris Webster wrote: Dear colleagues, Attached is a summary of this week's DAARWG teleconference. If any of you who attended feel that I have missed something or have misinterpreted your statements, please let me know and I will modify it. DAARWG members, please note that the document sent out on Monday, the GEO-IDE Concept of Operations, is a key document, that summarizes the approach being taken. It should have been circulated earlier, but there was (understandable) confusion about which documents to send us. I urge you to take a look at it. Regards, Ferris Webster Content-type: application/msword; name="0702 notes.doc" Content-disposition: attachment; filename="0702 notes.doc" Content-description: 0702 notes.doc Attachment converted: Macintosh HD:0702 notes.doc (WDBN/«IC») (001AE4A5) -- Bruce A. Wielicki Mail Stop 420 NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, VA 23681-2199 Phone: (757) 864-5683 FAX: (757) 864-7996