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New User Documentation Website#

We are proud to announce the launch of our new user documentation website!

At SCITAS, we try to write a documentation every time we think it could help our community. It could be to help understanding how the machines work, or for example, when a user asks assistance to compile a well established code, we also write a procedure that they can follow in the future, or that could be used by other users interested in the same code.

We observed that the original documentation grew a lot with the years and not always in a organized way. This resulted in a documentation that is ill-organized, difficult to navigate through, and not always up-to-date. A new user will have difficulties understanding where to begin with, what are the essential information to read, etc. Furthermore, the original documentation was hosted on an EPFL service providing Atlassian products such as Confluence, the tool used for our original documentation. This service will soon be taken down and we had to migrate the documentation somewhere else.

These two reasons were the perfect occasion to totally review the existing documentation and re-organize it in a more user friendly manner. For this task, we chose to use the MkDocs Python package. MkDocs is a free and open source tool that converts Markdown files into a static website. The tool is easy to use and a basic configuration can be set up in less than five minutes. Everything can be configured to match our needs and there is a huge ecosystem of third-party plugins that add interesting functionalities. Another advantage of MkDocs is that all the documentation is written in Markdown format. The later, is well spread, can be written on any text editor, and can be converted in any other formats by plenty of tools. This ensures that we won't need to reconvert manually all the documentation in case MkDocs is not maintained anymore.

This new documentation is organized as follows:

  • The getting started page is the SCITAS 101 for every new user. It gives a very short introduction to be able to use the machines as quickly as possible, while also pointing to the more complete documentation if necessary.
  • The user guide gathers everything we consider as essential to work on the SCITAS infrastructure. Every user should as much as possible read them once.
  • The advanced guide provides more topical information that fits very specific cases. Not all the articles concern all the users.
  • The "Supercomputer", "Storage system", and "Data center" sections provide different technical information concerning our infrastructures.
  • The SCITAS courses section gathers all the material from the different courses we provide.
  • Finally, the last section contains small descriptions of our contribution to various projects.

With this new documentation we also chose to totally re-think our communication. First of all, we decided to unify our EPFL webpage and our documentation into a single website. This will reduce information fragmentation and we think, will allow us to have a more impactful communication. Second, we decided to set up a "blog" in which we will add articles regularly. The main goals of this blog will be to:

  • Publish all the announcements concerning the SCITAS infrastructure. We will still send you a short email, but the complete information will in a blog post. The main point is to have an archive of all the announcements.
  • Show you the work we do behind the scene. Often, we take time to provide a "simple" feature or we change the way things works. This may sometime rightfully seem illogical to some of you and for this reason, we chose to explain what we do and most importantly why. We try to provide the best user experience as possible and we sometimes have to make choices that we would like to explain for more transparency.
  • Publish short tutorials related to HPC in general. It could be for example the summary of a user problem and its solution so that everyone can benefit from it, or an article on how to use a new feature of a programming language.

We really hope this new documentation will be more beneficial to our users than the original one. We will try our best to keep it up-to-date and add meaningful content regularly. Of course we would be very grateful that you contact us, should you have any constructive feedback or error to report.