FY 2001 User Survey Results
NERSC extends its thanks to the 237 users who participated in this year's
survey; this compares with 134 respondents last year.
The respondents represent
all five DOE Science Offices and a variety of home institutions:
see User Information.
Your responses provide feedback about every aspect of
NERSC's operation, help us judge the quality of our services, give DOE
information on how well NERSC is doing, and point us to areas we
can improve. Every year we institute changes based on the survey; some of
the changes resulting from the FY 2000
survey are:
- We increased the SP home inode and disk quotas as well as the SP
scratch space. SP disk
configuration satisfaction was higher this year and only one user
requested more inodes on this year's survey.
- Last year one of the two top SP issues was that the "SP is hard to use".
Based on
comments we received in last year's survey we wrote more SP web documents and
made changes to the user environment..
This year only 12% (compared with 25% last year) of the comments reflected
that the SP is hard to use.
- We added resources to the T3E pe512 queue
and created a new long64 queue:
satisfaction with T3E turnaround time improved this year.
- Last year we moved PVP interactive services from the J90 to the SV1
architecture and provided more disk
resources. Overall PVP satisfaction was rated higher in this year's
survey.
Users rated us on a 7-point satisfaction scale, with 7 corresponding to
Very Satisfied and 1 to Very Dissatisfied.
Based on responses from the Overall Satisfaction with NERSC questions,
we are doing as well as or better than last year. Two areas showed significant
improvement:
- available computing hardware
- allocations process
The areas of most importance to users are:
- available computing hardware
- overall running of the center
- network access
See Overall Satisfaction and Importance.
The average satisfaction scores from the questions about specific NERSC
resources
ranged from a high of 6.6 to a low of 4.5.
Areas with high user satisfaction include
- HPSS reliability, performance and uptime
- Consulting responsiveness, quality of technical advice, and follow-up
- Cray programming environment
- PVP uptime
- Account support
Areas with lower user satisfaction include
- Visualization services
- Batch wait times on all platforms
- SP interactive services
- Training services
- SP performance and debugging tools
The largest increases in user satisfaction came from the PVP
cluster: four PVP ratings increased by 0.3 to 0.8 points.
This was true last year as well (where the increase in satisfaction
from 1999 was even greater).
Other areas showing a
significant increase in satisfaction are
- T3E and SP batch wait times
- SP disk configuration
- SP Fortran compilers
- HPSS
- allocations process
Several scores were significantly lower this year
than last:
- training scores
- SP uptime
- SP interactive resources
- PVP Fortran compilers
See All Satisfaction Questions
and Changes from Previous Years.
When asked what NERSC does well, 35 respondents pointed to our stable and well
managed production environment, and 31
focussed on NERSC's excellent
support services.
Other areas singled out
include well done documentation, good software and tools, and the mass
storage environment.
When asked what NERSC should do differently the most common responses
were to provide more hardware resources, and to enhance our software
offerings.
Of the 49
users who compared NERSC to other centers, 57% said NERSC is the best or better
than other centers. Several sample
responses below give the flavor of these comments; for more details see
Comments about NERSC.
- "NERSC makes it possible for our group to do simulations on a scale that
would otherwise be unaffordable."
- "The availability of the hardware is highly predictable and appears to be
managed in an outstanding way."
- "Provides computing resources in a manner that makes it easy for the user.
NERSC is well run and makes the effort of putting
the users first, in stark contrast to many other computer centers."
- "Consulting by telephone and e-mail. Listens to users, and tries to setup
systems to satisfy users and not some managerial idea of how we should compute"
- "The web page, hpcf.nersc.gov, is well structured and complete. Also,
information about scheduled down times is reliable and useful."
Some of the suggestions for improvements:
- "Don't become oversubscribed. I'm worried that SciDAC will push for
oversubscription, please don't go there."
- "Get more hardware. DOE is falling way behind NSF."
- "Install zsh, please."
- "more debugging and optimization support for MPP platforms like seaborg"
- "I want something 10 times faster than Killeen but not MPP".
- "More access to capability machines that let long jobs of 32-64 pes go for
8 hours or more. Although many applications can
use a lot of processors, science studies often ramp up and down in size as
one walks through parameter spaces. Having a
complement of smaller parallel machines to match the big one is very
useful. These smaller machines do not need to scale
much past 64 pes."
- Better indexing of the sprawling website. Finding, e.g. compiler options or
queue limits takes some knowledge."
Below are the survey results. You can also see the survey text.
- User Information
- Overall Satisfaction and Importance
All Satisfaction Questions and Changes from Previous Years
- NERSC Information Management (NIM)
- Web and Communications
- Hardware Resources
- Software Resources
- Training
- User Services
- Comments about NERSC
For a single-file summary (no individual responses) click here.
|