The problem with that measuring citations is that it can take several
years (sometimes decades) for a research paper to gain traction, which
might be a longer time horizon that we have to show the ROI on an HPC
investment.
While we're at it, we could through in someone's Erdos number in see how
having access to HPC resources affects that. That's typically only
relevant to mathematicians, though.
Regarding Andrew Wiles, I saw him on campus on a regular basis when I
worked at IAS. One day, while driving home from work, decided to cross
the street right as I got the green light (which meant he should have
stayed on the sidewalk - a VERY common problem in Princeton), and I had
to slam on my breaks to avoid hitting him. I later told a friend I
almost ran over Andrew Wiles. Of course, the response was "who's that?"
--
Prentice
On 11/26/2013 09:54 AM, Peter St. John wrote:
Oh there is another metric besides number of papers published;
Citation Indexing and Impact Factor, the predecessors of Google "Page"
Ranking.
Instead of counting papers, or counting citations to papers, you count
citations weighted by their own citations, recursively.
So one year Andrew Wiles publishes two papers. Those two papers are
read by maybe six specialists in arithmetic algebraic geometry. But
those six guys are read by many more, etc (the recursion converges
rapidly, which is why Page Ranking is so effective), so Wiles' Impact
Factor is extravagant.
Peter
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 9:39 AM, Tim Cutts <t...@sanger.ac.uk
<mailto:t...@sanger.ac.uk>> wrote:
On 25 Nov 2013, at 23:03, Prentice Bisbal
<prentice.bis...@rutgers.edu <mailto:prentice.bis...@rutgers.edu>>
wrote:
4. I went to a BoF on ROI on HPC investment. All the presentations in
the BoF frustrated me. Not because they were poorly done, but because
they tried to measure the value of a cluster by number of papers
published that used that HPC resource. I think that's a crappy,
crappy
metric, but haven't been able to come up with a better one myself
yet. I
was very vocal with my comments and criticisms of the
presentations, so
if any of the presenters are reading this now, I apologize for
hi-jacking your BoF. Getting good ROI on a cluster is close to my
heart,
but is also difficult to quantify and measure. I hope I can be
part of
the discussion next year.
I can't think of another metric either. At the top of my
organisation, publications are *the* key metric that all
scientists are judged on. Publications are *the* product of any
scientific institution. We don't sell anything, so we can't
measure revenue. All we can measure are papers published per unit
time. The problem is that the publication of the paper is very
distant from the building of your compute infrastructure, so it's
very hard to put a sensible number on ROI for this stuff.
7. The cover band 'London Calling' played the IBM Platform
Computing/Intel party again. Despite calling themselves 'London
Calling'
they still do not play any Clash songs. They are a good cover
band, but
it's starting to get boring seeing the same band play the same
set year
after year.
It did at least have more atmosphere than either of the parties I
went to earlier in the week, which were pretty much like drinking
in a morgue. I won't name them, but we probably all know which
ones. Both were at establishments on the 16th street Mall. I had
a lot more fun and useful conversation in bars after abandoning ship…
Tim
-- The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome
Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number
1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969,
whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
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