Talk:Compute Canada Wiki

What structure should this front page have once there are a lot of content links? One scheme that has occurred to me is to use these headings:

• Systems and Services (e.g. "GP1", "Globus", ...)
• How-to Guides ("Intro to Linux", "Moving data around", "Parallel Programming", ...)
• Subject Guides ("Molecular Dynamics", "Fluid Dynamics", ...)

As you can see these divisions may overlap. (Consider "Globus" versus "Moving data around".) However, links between content pages should ameliorate this: "Systems and Services --> Globus" might lead to a short, technical description of the service, with a link out to the same page pointed to by "How-to-Guides --> Moving data around". My philosophy for the front page is that it should be complementary to the Search box, in that it tries to guide the user toward the right information no matter how the question is formed in the user's mind:

• "I want to know about ..."
• "How do I...?"
• "I'm working on..."

I have to spend more time staring at existing consortium front pages to see what this misses, if anything.

Ross Dickson (talk) 21:04, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Another thing to consider in all this is what role the left side bar will play Chris Geroux (talk) 15:08, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Discipline Guides

...or Domain Pages or whatever we call this section.

I proposed a half-baked list just now, but there are some puzzles here. I don't think the list should get too long, or it begins to lose usefulness. But what areas get grouped together? Molecular Dynamics is sort of Chemistry, but there's not a lot of overlap between the Chemists who run GROMACS and the ones who run Gaussian. The latter tend to run more of the same software as Atomic Physicists, who occasionally run Gaussian as well as VASP. And should we have a page called Biology that'll get both Ecologists and Molecular Biologists? Does Fluid Dynamics subsume Chemical Engineering? Astrophysicists and Aeronautical Engineers use CFD too, among many others.

Discipline Guides should probably be correlated with Wiki Categories, too (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories). But that doesn't solve the problem "What are the categories?" Ross Dickson (talk) 19:37, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't necessarily consider the list of domains to be either exhaustive or exclusive - I was only thinking of those domains which tend to be play a prominent role in HPC, with the list reserved ultimately to six or seven fields. For example computational chemistry, CFD, bio-informatics, astrophysics, not sure about what else? A category like CFD would obviously include (certain) engineers, (certain) physicists, even astronomers and people in the life sciences (blood flow problems).

I'm wondering how you want to handle the "advanced topics"? I think Maxime perhaps has in mind something like the "Advanced Computing - Do It Yourself" category on the CQ wiki and it's really a category for that (shrinking) percentage of our users who write their own codes more or less from scratch and so might be interested in such "exotic" topics as debuggers, compilers, profilers, parallelization libraries, system tools like strace, hardware counters and so forth. Perhaps it no longer warrants a category of its own on the principal Wiki page in 2016? --Daniel Stubbs (talk) 19:53, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Globus is a file transfer service