Re: batch mode for idv?

• To: Alison Eyth <eyth@xxxxxxx>
• Subject: Re: batch mode for idv?
• From: Don Murray <dmurray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 17:09:33 -0400

Hi Alison -

Alison Eyth wrote:

I saw some early versions of the integrated data viewer
and it looked pretty nice then, but it has really matured
over the past few years.  It's great that the public now has
access to this product!

Glad you like the improvements.  There will be a beta 1.1 release
in a couple of weeks with even more goodies.  I'm at a
regional Association of American Geographers conference and
was doing demos of 1.0.  I've been using the internal 1.1 for
so long I'd forgotten how much better it is than 1.0. ;-)

So far I've skimmed some of the user's guides and FAQs
and I haven't seen an answer to this question, so I thought
I'd post it  (I'm gathering data for a presentation about the
future of visualization tools for the air quality modeling
community).  My question is:

- is there a batch mode for the idv or is it a totally interactive tool?

It's mostly interactive.  You can invoke the IDV with a bundle
that creates displays and use the -image <filename> option to
have an image created and then the program exit.  The "problem"
with this is the overhead of starting up the JVM.  It can take
several seconds for this alone.

- if it's currently only interactive, are there any plans to make
  a batch mode available?

We are looking at ways to do this.  One model we are considering
is a mechanism where you can batch commands to a running IDV sesssion.
We also were recently funded for a large NSF ITR project in which
IDV figures prominently for displaying results from ensemble and
other modelling efforts.  So this will need a batch mode of sorts.

The reason I'm asking is that in my community of air quality
modelers, we often want to generate a suite of plots for
each model run that we do.  Currently, we use our tool
PAVE for this, which supports batch and interactive modes.
The idv is more sophisticated than PAVE, and it would be
great if you can define a suite of plots to generate and you
could tell it to go do that.

We're working with some folks at the EPA viz lab on IDV
issues for displaying air quality and other data and they
have expressed the same need.  It's also a request from
other groups.

So, the long and short of it is currently, there is no good
batch solution for IDV, but we have it on our plate.  When it
gets done though is another question. ;-)

Don
*************************************************************
Don Murray                               UCAR Unidata Program
dmurray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                        P.O. Box 3000
(303) 497-8628                              Boulder, CO 80307
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/donm
*************************************************************

• References:
  • batch mode for idv?
    • From: Alison Eyth