Search

The newest NERSC supercomputer Cori is a Cray XC40 system consisting of 2,388 Intel Xeon Haswell nodes and 9,688 Intel Xeon-Phi “Knights Landing” (KNL) nodes. Compared to the Xeon-based clusters NERSC users are familiar with, optimal performance on Cori requires consideration of KNL mode settings; process, thread, and memory affinity; fine-grain parallelization; vectorization; and use of the high-bandwidth MCDRAM memory. This paper describes our efforts preparing NERSC users for KNL through the NERSC Exascale Science Application Program, Web documentation, and user training. We discuss how we configured the Cori system for usability and productivity, addressing programming concerns, batch system configurations, and default KNL cluster and memory modes. System usage data, job completion analysis, programming and running jobs issues, and a few successful user stories on KNL are presented.

The research aims to create a smart user Support Assistant LAVA - a solution providing context sensitive and user experience aware support to a user of a software product. The solution is based on machine learning and search in a two-level distributed knowledge store. LAVA model focuses on providing user on a mouse click with a content relevant to a current context. LAVA uses context transferred from the supported product to instantly show a FAQ list of items used and/or positively rated by other users in the same context. Full-text search and a topic hierarchy are provided as well to cover as many of cases as possible given the content available currently in the Knowledge base. Main design ideas of the LAVA model are presented in the article including the calculation of ranges and creation of ranged context-sensitive FAQs, customizing the full-text search, organizing the topic hierarchy and integrating with the Service desk. The article covers as well the main considerations on how the LAVA model should be implemented in a successful solution, and a description of method to evaluate the model performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines user support issues concerning open-source software in computational sciences. The literature suggests that there are three main problem areas: transparency, learnability, and usability. Looking at questions asked in user communities for chemistry software projects, the author found that for software supported by feature-based documentation, problems of transparency and learnability are prominent, leading users to have difficulty reconciling disciplinary practices and values with software operations. For software supported by task-based documentation, usability problems were more prominent. The author considers the implications of this study for user support and the role that technical communication could play in developing and supporting open-source projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue presents reflections of international scholars on selected core issues of qualitative inquiry. They were produced in the context of an initiative to promote qualitative research in Switzerland, notably to build a network among qualitative researchers, to reflect on possibilities for a consensus on quality standards and teaching requirements, and to explore the viability of an archive and resource center for qualitative research. In the first part on the why and how of qualitative methods the reasons and objectives of the initiative are delineated, and the process of resurgence, legitimation, and institutionalization of qualitative methods is described. Then three major conceptual breaks in the field of qualitative inquiry are identified, and quality concerns in qualitative methods are discussed. In the second part on the why and how of archiving qualitative data, the situation in different European countries is presented. While France is just starting to collect qualitative data for archiving, the QualiData archive in Great Britain has already existed for more than a decade. In Germany, the Bremen Life Course Archive has the longest experience with systematic archiving of qualitative data. Crossing national borders, the Internet brings new challenges and potentials of providing resources and services on-line. It is also argued that the qualitative-quantitative divide is not very helpful, neglecting the complementarity and proximity of the two groups of methods in research, education, and archiving. It also prevents integrated data analysis and integrated styles of research, creating different archives and different types of software. Finally, crucial experiences of the QualiData archive in the area of user support are described and future measures discussed which should be taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of current application software packages have an extremely large number of functions because of the many different users envisioned for the software. This means that it is not easy for users to find useful functions. In this paper, the authors propose a system that supports the discovery of useful functions for users by allowing for shared referencing of function execution histories among users with similar uses for the software. The proposed system gathers a wide range of function execution histories over a long period of time, efficiently processes them, and then displays in a format that is easy to understand candidate functions that are unknown and useful to the user. The results of evaluation experiments using Microsoft Word 2000 and PowerPoint 2000 showed that an average of 63.7 functions were displayed as useful candidate functions to a total of nine subjects, with an average of 16.1 of them being unknown functions. In addition, the percentage of functions that users said were actually useful among the unknown functions discovered was 39.2% on average for Word and 46.3% on average for PowerPoint. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(12): 93–106, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10024 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]