NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

2008/2009 User Survey Results

Services and Communications

  • Legend
  • Satisfaction with NERSC Services
  • How Important are NERSC Services to You?
  • How useful are NERSC Services to You?
  • Where do you perform data analysis and visualization of data produced at NERSC?
  • Are you well informed of changes?
  • Comments about Services

 

Legend:

SatisfactionAverage Score
Very Satisfied 6.50 - 7.00
Mostly Satisfied - High 6.00 - 6.49
Mostly Satisfied - Low 5.50 - 5.49
ImportanceAverage Score
Very Important 2.50 - 3.00
Somewhat Important 1.50 - 2.49
Significance of Change
significant decrease
not significant
UsefulnessAverage Score
Very Useful 2.50 - 3.00
Somewhat Useful 1.50 - 2.49

 

Satisfaction with NERSC Services

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

Item Num who rated this item as: Total Responses Average Score Std. Dev. Change from 2007
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
SERVICES: Account support 1     3 8 87 248 347 6.66 0.64 -0.05
WEB SERVICES: NIM web interface     5 8 18 137 184 352 6.38 0.80 0.10
WEB SERVICES: Accuracy of information 1 2 1 5 26 132 157 324 6.32 0.85 -0.08
WEB SERVICES: www.nersc.gov overall   1 3 9 20 167 148 348 6.28 0.80 -0.10
WEB SERVICES: Timeliness of information 1   6 9 29 143 137 325 6.21 0.91 -0.07
TRAINING: New User's Guide 1   5 11 23 92 98 230 6.14 1.00 -0.07
TRAINING: Web tutorials 1   7 10 23 83 77 201 6.04 1.07 -0.10
SERVICES: Allocations process 2 1 10 20 24 109 117 283 6.03 1.16 -0.14
WEB SERVICES: Ease of finding information 1 4 12 10 38 177 98 340 5.95 1.05 -0.10
SERVICES: Data analysis and visualization services 1   1 10 10 36 32 90 5.93 1.14  
SERVICES: Data analysis and visualization consulting       14 6 17 24 61 5.84 1.19  
WEB SERVICES: Searching 1 4 6 21 48 100 54 234 5.68 1.14 -0.03
TRAINING: NERSC classes       20 11 22 21 74 5.59 1.17 0.20

 

How Important are NERSC Services to You?

3=Very important, 2=Somewhat important, 1=Not important

Item Num who rated this item as: Total Responses Average ScoreStd. Dev.
1 2 3
SERVICES: Account support 5 75 239 319 2.73 0.48
SERVICES: Allocations process 12 82 171 265 2.60 0.58
WEB SERVICES: NIM web interface 11 161 151 323 2.43 0.56
SERVICES: Data analysis and visualization services 42 43 51 136 2.07 0.83
SERVICES: Data analysis and visualization consulting 43 42 30 115 1.89 0.79

 

How useful are NERSC Services to You?

3=Very useful, 2=Somewhat useful, 1=Not useful

Item Num who rated this item as: Total Responses Average ScoreStd. Dev.
1 2 3
TRAINING: New User's Guide 13 46 169 228 2.68 0.58
SERVICES: E-mail lists 4 115 240 359 2.66 0.50
TRAINING: Web tutorials 19 49 143 211 2.59 0.65
MOTD (Message of the Day) 24 116 200 340 2.52 0.63
TRAINING: NERSC classes 35 53 38 126 2.02 0.76
Phone calls from NERSC 91 88 57 236 1.86 0.78

 

Where do you perform data analysis and visualization of data produced at NERSC?

LocationResponsesPercent
All at NERSC 23 6.4%
Most at NERSC 44 12.2%
Half at NERSC, half elsewhere 57 15.8%
Most elsewhere 107 29.6%
All elsewhere 106 29.4%
I don't need data analysis or visualization 24 6.6%

 

Are you well informed of changes?

Do you feel you are adequately informed about NERSC changes?

AnswerResponsesPercent
Yes 362 97.6%
No 9 2.7%

Are you aware of major changes at least one month in advance?

AnswerResponsesPercent
Yes 334 91.5%
No 31 8.5%

Are you aware of planned outages 24 hours in advance?

AnswerResponsesPercent
Yes 347 93.0%
No 22 6.0%

 

Comments about Services:   18 respondents

Analytics Comments and Suggestions:   4 responses

NERSC visualization tutorials would be nice.

Many years back I felt NERSC was somewhat weak in providing information concerning movie making. My impression is that things improved but I do not know the current situation. In the last couple years i have used Quicktime Pro to create movies but wonder if tools at NRSC provide more or better capability .
Again, I am ignorant of the current situation and whether there are good tutorials on the NERSC website.

Improved visualization and analysis for large scale data. I would like to see parallel AVS support. I use the existing AVS Express on davinci extensively, but it is already becoming too small and too slow for the size of (M3D nonlinear plasma simulations) run on Franklin, even for jobs that are small by Franklin standards. One reason I am not pushing too hard to increase the size of my Franklin jobs beyond a few hundred cpus is that it will be very difficult to visualize the data at the higher resolution. I don't really know Visit, but from what I have seen the experts do with it, it just does not compare in quality to a developed AVS Express interface.

I need to catch up by using more analysis at NERSC.

Software Comments and Suggestions:   4 responses

it would be great to have python, numpy and sm all linked on the nersc computers.

please install gromacs

Matlab installed by NERSC does not provide complete math support compare to the matlab installed in my own personal computer.

The latest version of NCL (5.1.1) *correctly installed* on davinci ...

Hardware Comments and Suggestions:   3 responses

Many core SMP machines are extremely useful for many of the theories we use, which are necessarily very communication-heavy.

... A new davinci with more standard hardware (not Itanium) and much more of it

clusters with lots of memory and fast turn-around for short jobs

No additional services needed:   3 responses

Again, NERSC is the flag ship of DOE supercomputing. A great and valuable resource.

I cannot think of anything more than what NERSC offers now.

None right now.

Data Storage Comments and Suggestions:   2 responses

When I analyze my data, I need a place to do it and computer time to do it with. In theory, davinci would be the place. However davinci has very small disk allocations, so I cannot store the data on davinci for long enough to finish a run. I've been using /scratch, but I keep getting messages about needing to reduce my holdings there.
Alternatively, I can work on franklin:/project. But that's not accessible from batch jobs, and it doesn't accomplish your goal of having me process my data on your data processing machine.

larger space

Other Suggestions:   3 responses

Lots more help porting code to new platforms. Codes like NIMROD have 5-10 different version, so realize that 5-10 versions need to be ported to new platforms. I think lots of consulting time needs to be allocated to porting code when a new system is brought up.

It would be useful to me if the MOTD were available as a news feed (RSS/ATOM).

I appreciate the generous allocation to our project, but I just found out that our allocation is reduced from 1,000,000 to 750,000. I guess this is due to the policy in place that if some percentage is not used, it will be returned, which I can understand. I also understand that NERSC may return some portion to me, if I request.
However, I would suggest that NERSC should consider this carefully. For instance, I normally test and develop my codes during a first few months of the year, and I do teach classes. But in the summer, I have lots of time. Secondly, we are fortunate to have access NERSC computers, so we use the computing time very carefully and save some time for later big runs. In some cases, the referees will ask us to provide more data, but we do not have time to run it. This is the caution that we have to build in when we use NERSC computers. I have more to say about this, but I suggest to consider this. One option would be to let the users choose a time frame when their peak time period would be during the year.