NERSC 1998 User Survey Results

These are the complete responses to this question, with a few minor edits.

T3E comments:

• The main problem with the machine is that it's too popular.

• mcurie seems really crowded and slow right now;

• Please, give us longer queue times on mcurie! relevant account users should be notified IMMEDIATELY when they get more time allocation

• However, the T3E queue configuration effectively prevents a large class of problems from taking advantage of this capability. This is NOT what we signed up for!

• The relative allocations of grand challenge and non-grand challenge users of the T3E is a difficult policy issue, although this is perhaps more a problem for DOE than for NERSC.

• I appears that you people offer LOTS more than the dummy user (me) realizes. Perhaps you could remind us of this periodically.

• The setcub command is really inconvenient to use.

• Those of us who are not sure the MPP/T3E is a useful machine for our projects wonder how deep NERSC will support the SMP approach.

• I frequently use Newton and although I am happy with the machine it seems the operating environment was just thrown together rather than being properly set up. I can't remember what all I've come across, I know some of the problems involved printing. Perhaps at a convenient time (at the next OS upgrade?) someone could run through the standard sys-admin "checklist" and make sure that all the standard unix utilities are installed and working.

• Of course, I need multi-Teraflop or even Petaflop computing, and I need it yesterday. As you can tell, I'm less than satisfied with HPSS, and feel that it represents a step backwards from CFS. Over the years NERSC has been the most reliable source of production computing for scientific research and development, by concentrating on scientific computing ahead of computer science. I hope it remains this way.

• I see very little to gripe about when it comes to people or policies at NERSC. Perhaps the computing power seems misappropriated to me at times. I CAN'T do the things I try to do at NERSC on ANY WORKSTATION! Self-serving as it is to say, perhaps tasks that meet this criterion should drive choices in computing machinery and machine access policies.

• You guys are doing an excellent job. Congratulations!

• In general NERSC is a great computing center, I don't know what I would do without PDSF and HPSS.

• It's good place to run programs. It's reliable and fast.

• All in all NERSC does a good job. There are very few things that I would change, except for the couple of remarks I've suggested above.

• In general, I am pretty satisfied with the service given by NERSC

• I am very satisfied. I hope I get my allocation request!

• I appreciate the service.

• I and my students have been using NERSC since about 1988, and overall I've been quite pleased. Consider this as a COMPLIMENT from a user!

• basically .. you are doing a job, but there is room for improvement.

• I pray for stability in your software and hardware for many years to come

• Thank you for proving the resources.

• Thanks! Its been lots of fun.

• Overall, I'm pretty happy with the service.

• It's been a pleasure working with you.

• overall I am very pleased with NERSC. Just miss being able to retrieve email from SAS

• Since the move to LBL, NERSC has improved its customer interface.

• I will be interacting with some members of your scientific visualization group and the developers of Parallel NETCDF. All this software is going to be of great help for us and I will be looking forward to your next survey to include my comments about them.
  There are very few places that offer all the support that NERSC does. This is vital to maximize the performance of your systems, our applications and the results from our research. My colleagues and I really appreciate your help!

• I don't use the account very much. It was set up so that I could help with the netcdf parallelization effort. I'm happy that NERSC taking the initiative on this, and I'm very pleased that the personnel working on this are so good that I've not needed to log on and help them.

• no.

• I have skipped many questions because I have rarely used NERSC in the past 2 years.

• We do not use nersc services.

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