Snicdocs

Name	Snicdocs
Description	A knowledgebase of user oriented information in Swedish academic high performance computing.
Project financing	SNIC
Is active	yes
Start date	2011-05-20
End date

Snicdocs is the working name for the wiki you are now reading. Its purpose is to become the place for user oriented information in Swedish academic high performance computing. Some examples include:

• What computing resources are available.
• What storage solutions are available?
• What software is available where, and under what conditions?
• How can I use them?
• Who are the people I can get help from?

Snicdocs will also be used to advertise projects, services and activities within Swedish academic HPC.

The idea is that Snicdocs should contain information applicable across all centers in Sweden, and link to original source for documentation that is valid worldwide. And conversely, link to local pages at specific centres for information on local implementations that are is different enough to warrant special description. Consequentially, it is a goal to keep Snicdocs and local pages as empty as possible, and instead strive to remove special cases, harmonize solutions, and to work to improve upstream documentation so that everything works as expected worldwide. An added benefit is that a wiki with less words and special cases is both easier to read and to keep up to date.

The contents of this wiki is kept current by application and systems experts in the Swedish research and HPC communities, and members of the general public can contribute by asking questions and posting comments on the "Discussion" pages, which accompany every normal wiki page (see tab on top of page). Snicdocs uses browser client certificates for authorization of editors.

Features

Snicdocs has cross-indexed and searchable information on a variety of topics, and presents it both in natural language and in dynamically generated, sortable views. Some features include:

• Security
  • Certificate based authentication and authorization.
  • Only staff can edit wiki pages, and only over https.
  • The general public can post comments and questions to talk pages.
• Resource information
  • Location and capabilities of academic resources for computation in Sweden.
  • Information on storage solutions.
• Software information
  • What software is available at which resource, and under what licensing conditions.
  • How to get maximum performance out of this software in my HPC jobs.
  • Where can I find more information on this software?
• Project information
  • Lists of current projects within Swedish HPC.
  • Purpose, description and progress within projects.
  • Involved personnel.
  • When will they be finished?
• Staff information
  • Presentations of Systems experts and Application experts and their expertises.
  • How much of their time is devoted to support.
  • What projects are they involved in.
• Grid
  • Manuals and guides for using SweGrid.
• Managerial views for SNIC
  • Who's salary is financed by SNIC?
  • What SNIC projects are

Development

Since the Snicdocs content contributors are distributed throughout Sweden, and opportunities for face-to-face meetings are infrequent, it is necessary for this system to be straightforward to keep current and consistent. Therefore, Snicdocs uses the widely known mediawiki software (used also by for example Wikipedia) with semantic mediawiki added for dynamic generation of content and for minimizing duplication of data. On top of this it requires well-defined scope and structure to ensure searchability and readability.

Most of the development of Snicdocs has gone into ensuring that best way to enter information into the wiki also is the easiest way, so that new data will be added in a readable, consistent, homogeneous and searchable manner. In practical terms this means determining useful category hierarchies for relevant topics, so that relevant pages can be found easily, and determining minimal useful sets of required information on pages within these topics, so that contributors can spend their time adding content rather than fulfilling arbitrary and sometimes inapplicable restrictions. Another major part has been writing reusable page templates and example pages for these topics, and to present sufficiently clear and concise editing guidelines so that our disparate and distributed editor community can still provide a homogeneous browsing experience for the users.

Snicdocs is hosted by NSC and developed mostly by User:Joel Hedlund (NSC).

Ideas

• Create a query listing all registered expertise
  • Look into using the Arrays extension or the Semantic Bundle of extensions for this purpose

Members

	Centre	Role	Field
Torben Rasmussen (NSC)	NSC	Application expert	Computational chemistry

Roles

User:Joel Hedlund (NSC) is the lead developer of Snicdocs.