Re: [DRAFT FOR REVIEW] Debian GNU/Linux top 34 supercomputer at 32.8 TFlops for detecting gravitational waves at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics

["Jon Evans" <saeng2oo@googlemail.com>]

It's come along quite nicely since earlier in the week...

Think of the audience of this sort of writing as a triangle standing on it's point. At the start everyone is with you and as you go on you'll slowly loose more and more readers until by the time you get to the last paragraph only the odd one or two are still reading.

So you need to grab them quickly.

The technical specs would work better placed at the end of the article I think. As it is it's too much information too quickly. If not then slow it down a little.

Same thing with the title. Make it short and snappy so that slashdot can list it easily. How about:

One of the World's 34 Most Powerful Supercomputers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics Runs Debian GNU/Linux

Or maybe add some date information like:

One of the World's 34 Most Powerful Supercomputers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics Has Been Running Debian GNU/Linux for the Last 4 Years

Same thing with the first paragraph:
The Observational Relativity and Cosmology Research Group are a team of scientists working at the Hannover Branch of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover, Germany. They are trying to directly detect the gravitational waves which were first predicted by Albert Einstein with the help of friends and colleagues within the LIGO Scientific Community. 

An ATLAS Debian GNU / Linux 1342 nodes cluster is used for the massive computing effort required. This cluster regularly achieves a measured performance (in terms of top500.org
linpack) of 32.8 TFlops, with a theoretical peak of about 50 TFlops. The cluster
uses 10+ TB RAM, approximately 1.3 PB storage, and has its own specialty network
which is able to transfer almost 4 days worth of DVD movies per second (2,880
Gb/s). This performance means that this ATLAS Debian GNU / Linux cluster is the 4th most powerful in Germany, 11thmost powerful in Europe, and 34th worldwide (using the top500.org november 2007 list). All of this power is provided at a cost of only EUR 1.8m (~ US$ 2.8m).

Sorry about using cut and paste but I'm at work with no access to the wiki!

The title could work well if you can throw in some specific detail. Cost would be the obvious choice but do you really want to advertise Debian as the cheap alternative?
But there again there's a lot to be said for keeping it short and snappy.

All the best,
Jon

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 1:58 AM, AndreMachado <andremachado@techforce.com.br> wrote:

Hello,
Please, review the proposed draft [0] until 01 June 2008, 18:00 GMT.
The corrections can be done directly at the wiki page draft, following the
guidelines [1].
Extensive improvements could be proposed at this list first, in case of
doubt.
Or subject atomically edited directly at the wiki, for easy reversal if
needed.
Many thanks.
Andre Felipe.

[0]
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/DebianTimesTeam/Drafts/GravitationalWaveDebianCluster
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/DebianTimesTeam/Guidelines




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