Introducing Lab Notebooks in User Documentation

ICER Documentation now features a new section called Lab Notebooks. In contrast to general information and tutorials found in the rest of the documentation, these notebooks are meant to detail how to solve very specific problems that ICER staff have helped users with on the HPCC. For example, a user submitted a ticket for help installing VisIt on the HPCC. Rather than just replying individually to the user, the responding Research Consultant created a public lab notebook page.

How is this different than general documentation? Lab notebook documentation describes how to solve a specific problem at a specific time. It is not regularly maintained in the way ICER maintains general documentation information. These pages can be casual, trial-and-error tutorials that are relevant for a period of time before becoming outdated. 

While these records are not meant to be a comprehensive list of every problem encountered on HPCC, the hope is that sharing information among users and staff will help avoid the need to reinvent the wheel each time one of these issues is encountered. We will expand our collection of lab notebooks with time as new problems are encountered and solved, so be sure to check in the next time you find yourself dealing with a tricky piece of software on the HPCC.

Nicholas Panchy, Ph.D. 
Research Consultant, ICER