NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

2004 User Survey Results

Web Interfaces

Legend:

SatisfactionAverage Score
Mostly Satisfied 5.50 - 6.49
Significance of Change
significant increase
not significant

Satisfaction with Web Interfaces

7=Very satisfied, 6=Mostly satisfied, 5=Somewhat satisfied, 4=Neutral, 3=Somewhat dissatisfied, 2=Mostly dissatisfied, 1=Very dissatisfied

 

ItemNum who rated this item as:Total ResponsesAverage ScoreStd. Dev.Change from 2003
1234567
Seaborg section       3 10 47 85 145 6.48 0.72 0.48
Accuracy of information 1     6 6 64 91 168 6.40 0.84 0.15
HPSS section       4 11 30 49 94 6.32 0.85 0.58
NERSC web site overall (www.nersc.gov)       2 21 76 83 182 6.32 0.72 0.32
Accounts section 1     6 7 41 55 110 6.28 0.97  
NIM     1 7 17 64 74 163 6.25 0.85 0.17
Timeliness of information     3 5 18 76 65 167 6.17 0.87 0.12
Software section     3 5 11 33 46 98 6.16 1.02 0.29
On-line help desk       10 9 35 45 99 6.16 0.97 0.14
Status and Statistics section 1   2 7 11 40 43 104 6.07 1.10 -0.00
PDSF section     1 6 5 16 17 45 5.93 1.12 0.10
Ease of finding information 1   9 6 30 78 54 178 5.89 1.09 0.09
Searching     4 14 6 27 20 71 5.63 1.24 0.19
SciDAC       12 4 11 13 40 5.62 1.23  

 

Comments about web interfaces:   19 responses

11   General Web Comments
4   NIM / ERCAP Web Comments
3   PDSF Web Comments
1   Online HelpDesk Comment
General Web Comments:   11 responses

The web information on the NERSC web site is so great that I rarely have to call the NERSC staff.

This is a big help - makes using the systems at NERSC much more transparent...

They are useful and I use them fairly regularly. Note that I've a fairly good information digger and others who I work with are not as successful at finding relevant information on your website.

I don't use the web interface very often. For checking my used CPU-hours I just use the getnim command. However when I'm looking for some information, I found it on the webpage without any problems.

I find that searching for information is so time consuming I just normally don't do it.

A more effective search engine of NERSC web pages would be appreciated. For the software, hyperlinks to the home page of each package would be good.

Mostly don't use. Software information is difficult to find.

NERSC response: We hope that you find the organization of software information on the new www.nersc.gov website has improved.

Need to get rid of password access except for account management.

NERSC response: Certain kinds of information needs to be protected from general public access, e.g. pages that display usernames. These pages are password protected. There are no longer special web passwords; access is now via your NIM/LDAP password.

I want a single password for all things nersc.

NERSC response: NERSC is moving in the direction of using the NIM/LDAP password for everything. As of January 2005 NIM, the PDSF and web pages use this password. As new machines are brought online they will also use the NIM/LDAP password.

It would be nice if it were more oriented to problem solving, instead of serving up huge amounts of only slightly useful information.

Forgot the ISIC centers on the scidac page

NIM/ERCAP Web Comments:   4 responses

Request for allocations is the best! Easy to use, only thing is, hard to get a good print copy or electronic copy for our records.

NERSC response: You can use the Show selected requests in PDF format button located at the bottom of the ERCAP Request List window. For 2006 requests we plan to use PDF for the "Show Complete Request" tab.

The many frames that are part of the NIM interface are sometime annoying.

The NIM access repeatedly rejects my first access attempt (citing wrong password); this happens EVERY time I try to login to NIM. The next access attempt generally works fine. I'm not sure if other users experience this issue; or if it can be resolved?

It would help if the NIM accounting information had a timestamp of when it was updated last. I often ingest the 1-line current repo summary into a spreadsheet to forecast our progress/burnrate vs our remaining allocation. This becomes particularly important as we near the end of our allocation. Not knowing the time that the NIM reports are updated adds uncertainty to my estimates.

PDSF Web Comments:   3 responses

There are new machines added to the pdsf cluster beyond pdsflx251. It would be nice if their information be listed on the 'hardware-> compute nodes' page so that we can plan our work accordingly.

After the new web sites were introduced some FAQ answers with links in them point to nowhere. Sometimes these other websites are supposed to give the final explanation, which is bad when it's missing.
("The answer to the problem was explained earlier http://..., see http://... also.")

The recent NERSC web site reorganization seems to have left at least the PDSF portion of the website somewhat disorganized...

Online HelpDesk Comment:   1 response

The web tracking system for help desk requests is excellent!