The insideHPC Top 5 for 2007

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HPCwire readers may know that every week I write a summary of the items from the news stream that strike me as interesting in some way. This week’s issue is a little different. Since it is the last HPCwire of 2007, Michael invited me to spend some time reflecting on the year past. Rather than give you yet another pundit retrospective, I dug into the access logs on the insideHPC.com supercruncher and wrote up the top 5 stories that you guys clicked on or Googled for during the year.

A bonus? As far as I know, this article is the only time the acronym “WTF” has been used at HPCwire. Victory is mine!

Here’s an excerpt from the start of the article that looks back on the year past for insideHPC.com. To read the whole thing, click over to HPCwire.

This week we’re stepping back from our usual 7-day shot of what’s going on in the world of HPC and taking a peek at the long view. I’ve combed through the insideHPC.com archives to come up with some of the most popular themes and news items from the full year of coverage, as determined by reader page views and clicks.

First, some stats. We started publication of insideHPC.com on Dec. 28, 2006, with post one. As of this writing (early morning on Dec. 20, 2007), we have written 1,273 posts about HPC news. Our readership has grown too, from 1 (me!) on Day 1 to nearly 1,000 visitors a day in December of this year, and all from the very tightly knit world of HPC.

There are two biases in this analysis. First, about 40 percent of my traffic comes from search engines, and that has grown over the year. These referrals are to deep links in the site, and this traffic biases in favor of posts that have been around longer. insideHPC.com has a fairly high page rank, which means that we show up on the first page for lots of searches in HPC. In fact, many of the same searches for which HPCwire shows up (a good thing!).

Second, readership has built steadily throughout the year. As more and more readers turn to insideHPC for a daily swig of HPC news, the pool of potential readers and clickers grows, which biases in favor of the more recent posts.

I’ve made absolutely no attempt to correct for these biases. But, I was surprised to see posts from as recently as this month alongside posts from March show up in the site’s top content. So it may be that this summary is at least partially representative of what the HPC community thought was interesting throughout the year.

I think it’s a fun read; it was certainly fun to write. The top stories you were interested in? The Bull/HP marriage that wasn’t, NVIDIA’s magic cards, CFS and ZFS, Google’s HPC grab and dash, and AMD.

Read the whole thing here.

Comments

  1. The M&A activity (small HPC companies combining with big non-HPC companies) will probably increase the business buzz for HPC in general. That is, investors may actually start to pay attention to this space.

    The only question then is how long the recent tech stock rally in the US will continue. Can the bubble last long enough for “HPC” to be as sexy as “Web 2.0”?