29 February 2016

Learning about data before learning with data

I've put together a short and opinionated guide to books about data worth reading. If your favorite book didn't make the list, please leave a comment listing the book and why it is worth including.

You'll find Books for scientists and data scientists under the "Pages" heading at the top of the right column of this blog along with the RDA Video Tutorials page. Can you think of other permanent pages we should create and list there?

12 February 2016

Upcoming improvements to the Globus login process

On February 13, starting at 10 AM CST, Globus will be upgrading its data transfer services and Globus transfers will not be available while this release is deployed to their production environment.  This downtime will affect all Globus data transfers initiated from the RDA website.  Globus services are expected to be back online at approximately 3 PM CST.

Included in the release are upgrades to the Globus authentication and authorization mechanisms which will allow RDA users to access the service using their RDA login e-mail and password.  A separate Globus username and password are no longer required.  To log in using your RDA credentials, select the 'NCAR RDA' organization on the Globus login page, and then follow the instructions to enter in your RDA user e-mail and password.  RDA users who currently have a Globus username and password may continue to log in with their Globus credentials by selecting 'GlobusID' from the list of organizations.

For more information on the upcoming release and improvements, see the Globus blog post at https://www.globus.org/blog/enhanced-login-mechanism-streamlines-access-globus.

04 February 2016

Subsetting to save time and bandwidth

Many people use RDA data to initialize the WRF model.  Some researchers ask for help to cope with bandwidth constraints.

Others may not even be aware that they are running into bandwidth constraints until too late--when they get the "429 Too Many Requests" error after their IP address has been blocked for overuse of RDA resources.

We want to help you get the data you need to do your work.   But you will save time and bandwidth if you keep a few simple points in mind.