Snicdocs

From SNIC Documentation
Revision as of 10:58, 12 March 2012 by Joel Hedlund (NSC) (talk | contribs) (Created page with "{{project info |description=A knowledgebase of user oriented information in Swedish academic high performance computing. |financing=SNIC |active=yes |start date=2011-05-20 |end d...")
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search
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 to put 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?

The idea is for Snicdocs to contain information applicable across all centers in Sweden, and to link to the original source for information valid worldwide. And conversely, to link to local pages at specific centres for those cases where a local implementation 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 working 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). This site uses browser installed client certificates for authorization of editors.

Development

Since the content contributors to Snicdocs are distributed throughout Sweden and opportunities for face-to-face meetings are infrequent, it is necessary for a project like this to have well-defined scope and structure, and 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.

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 are easily found, and determining minimal useful sets of required information on pages within these topics, so that only the information that is absolutely required actually is required, so that contributors can spend their time adding content rather than fulfilling arbitrary and sometimes inapplicable content 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).


Members

 CentreRoleField
Torben Rasmussen (NSC)NSCApplication expertComputational chemistry