"I have found the consulting services to be quite responsive, friendly, and helpful. At times they went beyond the scope of my request, which resulted in making my job easier." "Provides reliable machines, which are well-maintained and have scheduling policies that allow for careful performance and scaling studies." "Provides a stable, user-friendly, interactive environment for code development and testing on both MP machines and vector machines." "NERSC provides a well-run supercomputer environment that is critically important to my research in nuclear physics." .

In this year's NERSC User Survey, our clients gave us an overall satisfaction grade of 6.25 on a 7-point scale, a 0.8-point increase over last year. The biggest increases in satisfaction were with the allocations process, the HPSS system and the T3E. The average scores ranged from a high of 6.6 for timely response to consulting questions, to 4.0 for PVP batch wait time.

The areas users are happiest with this year are consulting services, HPSS reliability and uptime, as well as PVP and T3E uptime. Areas of concern are batch wait times for both PVP and T3E systems, visualization services, the availability of training classes, and PVP resources in general.

In their verbal comments, users focused on NERSC's excellent support staff and its well-run center with good access to cycles, hardware and software support, and reliable service. When asked what NERSC should do differently, the most common response was "provide even more cycles."

Of the 52 users who compared NERSC to other computing centers, half said NERSC is the best or better than other centers, 23% simply gave NERSC a favorable evaluation or said they only used NERSC, 19% said NERSC is the same as other centers or provided a mixed evaluation, and only 4 said that NERSC is not as good a other centers.

View the complete survey results.