Workshop on online documentation in the supercomputing environment

Conference · Sat Dec 01 04:00:00 EST 1990

OSTI ID:10183293

Caldwell, G; Rew, J ^[1]; Cohen, M; Solem, A ^[2]

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1. comps.; National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States)
2. comps.; Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)

Many people are interested in online user documentation for supercomputers and the continuing problems that plague us: problems of delivering online information in a heterogeneous computing environment that includes supercomputers and workstations, and lack of vendor solutions that work in diverse computing environments for diverse types of documentation. These problems have made it difficult to develop online documentation systems that have proved to be broadly effective. With changing technology and supercomputing environments, we believe the time is right to make substantial progress in this field. It was in this context that the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Los Alamos National Laboratory organized the Workshop on Online Documentation in the Supercomputing Environment in Colorado Springs, April 3--6, 1990. Twenty-eight participants came from leading supercomputing sites, including the national laboratories, National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation supercomputing centers, university and regional supercomputing centers and Cray Research and IBM. As a group representing twelve diverse supercomputing centers, participants in the workshop saw a need for a common online documentation system that could serve a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. We also desired the efficiency to be gained of sharing documentation in machine-readable form among hardware and software vendors as well as between supercomputing centers. We did not see any currently existing software products meeting all of these needs. We thus believed we needed to establish a forum to advocate the development or evolution of a suitable online documentation system. We hope that this workshop has resulted in increased understanding and will have served as another step toward the development of online documentation for supercomputer users.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States); National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE, Washington, DC (United States); National Science Foundation, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: W-7405-ENG-36
• OSTI ID: 10183293
• Report Number(s): LA--11990-C; NCAR/TN--353; CONF-9004367--Summs.; ON: DE92040949
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200
DOCUMENTATION
INTERACTIVE DISPLAY DEVICES
MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTERS
MEETINGS
SUPERCOMPUTERS