NERSC 1998 User Survey Results

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

Consulting and support staff, user focus:

• Consultant responses have been excellent (timely-- and patient!)

• I like how consultants answer questions. They do it promptly and it is easy to understand them. I appreciate it very much.

• The consultants are excellent and they respond very rapidly.

• Excellent user support, probably the best in the world for high-end computing.

• It serves it's user base quite well. The emphasis is still on the user.

• The consulting services for NERSC are excellent. It is very easy to get started even with no Cray experience.

• The consult staff is willing to help with a wide range of issues.

• I've been very pleased with the accessibility, knowledgeability and friendliness of the support staff. My student and I are first time users so this is very important (we've had a lot of basic questions).

• Consulting services performed an excellent job assisting with problems arising from Cray's (unique) version of f90, i.e. compiler-generated errors in the executable (Cray's responsibility) in addition to helping me to adapt my f77 codes to f90 syntax (my responsibility).

• Account services are normally very prompt. I would like to mention Harsh Anand who was particularly helpful with a problem I had during the past year. Also I appreciate Tom Deboni's help in getting acquainted with HPSS when it was coming online.

• The consultants are knowledgeable and responsive. This is the biggest improvement in services since the move from LLNL.

• I have always had good response from the consulting services at NERSC.

• Good user support. In the few instances when an issue arises that can't be resolved by looking at the web and man pages it has been my experience that the NERSC consulting staff is very helpful.

• Dealing with its costumers in a fair and professional manner.

• Consulting support is excellent. My questions never go unanswered.

• Good communication of problems.

• Cares about its users.

• consulting.

• User support

• I found user support services (the people) to be especially helpful

• telephone consultants, account maintenance

• user help

• And support services are good also.

• great consulting help!

• Consulting

• Responding to problems.

• customer service

• Consultant support

• Consulting help

• consulting is excellent

• Consulting, account services

• consultation

• User support including training and consulting services.

• convenient account setup and support, good consulting services

• You all are very good about getting back to me when I have a call in for support.

• Consulting and support

• On-call support was very helpful.

• Excellent in house technical and user support!

• Keeping users up to date

• consulting

• Consulting and web pages!!

• Consultants are very helpful.

• As a service center NERSC does a great job keeping the T3E's up and providing easily accessible information relating to hardware and software. Moreover, the intellectual quality of NERSC support and research staff is excellent and they are easy to communicate with.

• Gives us access to high-end, high-capacity and capability machines without too many limitations on the way codes can be run. There is a good mix of machines, serial and parallel, and a good mix of running modes, interactive and batch.

• nersc parallel computing is unparalleled. i hope you retain your commitment to it.

• Handles a large number of remote users

• Most everything is done well; service to a very diverse community is very good.

• Providing awesome computing resources, consulting services, training (especially users helping users).

• Operate systems and educate users.

• The facility seems to be well managed. Its down a fair bit, but principally due to scheduled downtime.

• nersc is good in general

• The overall computer availability has improved.

• Organization and access to large computing resources, user help.

• It provides a good computing environment.

• run the computers, provide documentation, great consulting help!

• Reasonably good hardware availability.

• Provide high performance computation

• Supplies reliable cycles to a broad user base.

• provide facility for scientific calculations

• Hardware and software support.

• Good enough for me.

• Serves a wide variety of intermediate size projects

• Hardware well maintained.

• provides and maintains computers

• Keeping Crays running.

• Providing large scale computer resources

• the machine environments (with the exception of Newton) are set up well

• NERSC is good for having all the numerical libraries.

• Fast, efficient. Almost no waiting in queues. [J90 user]

• Good job of providing cycles and a user-friendly system.

• Backup by cfs is great. Computing is very reliable.

• MPP service. Networks. Storage. Consulting.

• machine access, uptime, consultant availability

• the stability of the C90 and CFS

• I have never had problems accessing killeen remotely. The only time delays are on my end, not yours.

• Supplies a good access to resources including sensible batch queue limits on all platforms, and sensible priority/charging algorithms on PVP machines.

• online-tutorials, training

• The online tutorials and tech notes is very helpful.

• I also have found the web site to be very helpful.

• Web site is extremely useful. The examples of how to run programs, etc. are important.

• documentation

• On those topics for which NERSC has tutorials, the tutorials are extremely helpful.

• Consulting and web pages!!

• Web Pages, Consulting Services, Allocation Process.

• there is sufficient information on the web and man pages for a new user to get up and running in a reasonable amount of time without special training.

• Run the T3E

• Keeping the T3E up and running.

• maintenance of T3E

• The machine works! There is sufficient memory now. It's nice to have pierre - 32node jobs get run much faster there.

• I find that it is very convenient to be able to submit >3 batch jobs and have them automatically be submitted, particularly since the maximum run time is ~4 hours.

• Migration of files on CRAY machines

• managing disk space

• Something like NERSC is of great interest for the physics community. Experiments are performed by large collaborations (50-500 people) that consist of a lot of university groups. The data volume that needs to be stored and analyzed is of the order of several 100 GB to several TB! That's why HPSS is great.

• Access to the CFS system has speeded up. I enjoy having a large "home" directory and not need to worry about "touching" files every month or so.

• The C90 is a great machine. I've done a lot of physics on it that I could not have done elsewhere.
• The C90 is a wonderful machine. Every effort should be made to retain this capability.

• Our DOE monitor has been very good about getting us additional time whenever we run out.

• The scientific computing support (Andrew Canning) is excellent.
• Moreover, the intellectual quality of NERSC support and research staff is excellent and they are easy to communicate with.

• My principal aggravation is in being asked to provide research documents to NERSC. Like most people, I'm busy and this is a pain in the butt that I'd like to avoid.

• I am not updated about your status lately. Mainly what I have noticed lately is that you always are trying to change allocations etc. Good things is hard to say, but I am sure that you must be doing some good things..

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