Difference between revisions of "Funding The Cluster Documentation Project"

Revision as of 14:06, 1 September 2016

A Unique and Effective Sponsorship Opportunity

The Cluster Documentation Project (CDP) is seeking corporate and organizational sponsors to help fund additional content. The content areas will cover a wide range of both hardware and software issues and is planned to include basic HPC fundamentals, parallel programming, HPC Cloud, GPU computing, Hadoop and Big Data, software tools and applications, system design and procurement, and more. The project is expected to have a high impact on both users and vendors.

The project will focus on "how to" and essential background information. The resource will be created on-line as a wiki similar to Wikipedia and will be open and shareable to everyone. It will also be possible to create books directly from the wiki content. The entire wiki and any derived books will be available under a Creative Commons license. That is, readers are free to re-use, improve, and republish the information provided they keep the original author(s) attribution and do not charge for the content.

Wrap a Book Around Your Technology or Service

Getting your message out to the HPC community and market is important. New and existing HPC users are constantly searching the Internet for up-to-date and accurate information, and the CDP is designed to be the first place users land when they are seeking cluster and HPC insights. You need to be there. In addition to contributing your technical value proposition, the CDP offers both banner ad and logo branding. We can also help you use the CDP to create professionally branded manuals, books, and documentation for your customers.

Understanding the full impact of an HPC product or service can require deep technical conversations. Companies often produce high-level white papers to help explain new products and services. The CDP can be used to create short booklets or small books that help potential customer fully understand your technological value proposition and give weight to your sales approach.

In order to kick-start the project, we will be releasing our first free book, entitled Essential HPC: Practical high performance concepts, techniques, and procedures. We are seeking sponsors for the 2017 edition Please contact Xand Marketing for more details.

Credible and Professional

The principal editor of the CDP will be Douglas Eadline, a practitioner and chronicler of the Linux Cluster HPC revolution. Doug has worked with HPC systems since 1988 and is a co-author of the original Beowulf How-To document. Prior to starting and editing the popular Cluster Monkey web site in 2005, he served as Editor-in-chief for ClusterWorld Magazine. Doug has written numerous articles in both print and web-based publications and was selected by AMD to write the short, but popular, book High Performance Computing for Dummies. He has also co-authored books on Big Data and Hadoop. A team of capable and experienced writers, editors, and artists has been assembled to work with Doug to create a professional resource for the entire community.

The project will be managed by Xand Marketing and Seagrove LLC, the publisher of Cluster Monkey. At this point in time, some basic information is already in place As mentioned, the project will also create books directly from the wiki content using the WikiBooks module. At a minimum one new book will be professional produced each year. Books will be freely available in Open Document Format (ODF - OpenOffice format), PDF, and as paper books using print on demand. The inaugural book will be entitled Essential HPC: Practical high performance concepts, techniques, and procedures and serve as an introduction to HPC.

The Big Picture

An open reservoir of documentation will help grow the community and market. HPC users and vendors are free to use any CDP content for their own projects and products as long as the license terms are maintained. A professional up-to-date documentation resource will bring HPC to new users and markets. Continued support beyond the initial start-up period is expected to come from the production of CDP books and vendor sponsorships.