Welcome to the New Cluster Monkey

Published on Wednesday, 29 February 2012 20:46

Written by Douglas Eadline

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Faster, better, cheaper, and hopefully not too broken

In case you have not noticed, we look different. There have been massive upgrades in the monkey kingdom. The front end is new and hopefully faster -- the template name was afterburner so it better be fast. And, because we are technical monkeys we kept the clean simple look with the focus on good content. To that end, we have tried to keep article presentation dense and clean (i.e. you can read more than two short paragraphs before hitting the next page button). The front page now has most of the widget type things on the left and content links on the right including the latest and popular articles links, a poll, and syndicated links to popular sites and blogs. As with our previous format, the  stories are in the middle. We also are thankful to our sponsors who support us in keeping the banner advertisements to a minimum.

The backend server and delivery platform (Joomla) have been upgraded as well. Overall things should work much more smoothly and allow us to offer more features (see below). Unfortunately there were a few glitches with the upgrade. Content was automatically converted and it seems most of it came through just fine. We could not transfer the old comments, howerver. As  time permits we will attempt to manually copy them from the old site. The polls also had problems and we need to write a script to convert to the current polling platform (or we may just archive some screen shots of the old poll results). Similarly a picture display module needs to be upgraded so we can recover some Beobash snapshots.

Overall, things went better than expected and the new hardware and software have put us in a good position for growth. Speaking of which, we are planing some new things. First, more content is in the works as well as some new features. Later this year we will be starting a monthly newsletter presenting technical webinars (free) to site subscribers (sign-up now on the left). We have a few other ideas we want to try out as well.

Our goal is to provide open quality cluster and High Performance Computing (HPC) information to our readers. We hope that the information generates discussion and conversation within the HPC community and enables users, administrators, and managers to benefit from the art and science of  HPC clustering.

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