2005 User Survey Results: HPC Consulting

Legend:

Satisfaction with HPC Consulting

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

Comments about Consulting:   46 responses

Good service:   20 responses

Nice job!

The consultants do well in a tough job.

NERSC's technical help has been excellent. Each issue I brought to their attention was dealt with quickly, many times within the same day, if not while I was on the phone with them.

good work and thank you.

I've only talked to them about password resets and when some machines are going to be up, but they were helpful.

really very helpful and knowledgeable

I think the consultants at NERSC are doing a great job!

I continue to be impressed with the competence and helpfulness of the NERSC consulting staff.

This group is great. They have been very helpful.

They are good

My experiences with consulting at NERSC have been uniformly positive

In general I find consulting at NERSC superb.

NERSC consultants are always very helpful and prompt at replying. I have accounts on a number of other computing centers and rank NERSC the highest in this regard

Very good

The high-quality online consulting system is one of the most valuable aspects of NERSC.

The consultants are excellent and set NERSC apart from other major computing centers

Great Job, folks. Keep up the good work!

NERSC has by far the best consulting service of all the computing centers that I know.

NERSC has the highest level of consulting support that I can imagine. Consultants are knowledgeable, friendly, and have dedication to customer service. If only everybody else in other parts of my life were as good!

I have found the consultants very useful, prompt to reply, and very helpful with whatever problem I encountered. Thanks!

Mixed evaluation:   3 responses

Iwona is fantastic at responding to and resolving PDSF problems in a timely manner. My experience with non-PDSF support staff has been much worse -- slow response for even simple tasks like rebooting a bad diskvault or compute node. The advertized 4 hour turnaround for online help requests seems to only be true for Iwona.

I'm very happy with the consulting in general. Sometimes (if people are on vacation, on travel, during weekends), there seems to be a lack of experts on call/duty for pdsf. The staff on the 'general' hotline is not necessarily very helpful for pdsf problems. I don't blame them but there should be somebody in reach to resolve (or at least look at) the problems which arise during these times.

I mostly use PDSF. When the PDSF consultant is in everything is great. Iwona is a wonderful help to all of us at KamLAND and when she is on travel it is noticeable because the performance of PDSF is often noticeably worse and the response to questions and problems (usually from consultants not specializing in PDSF), while well-intentioned has sometimes not been particularly useful. If there was one complaint I have, its that there does not appear to be enough staff to cover the consulting needs for PDSF. I get the impression that the personnel resources for PDSF are stretched very thin.

NERSC response: For the above three comments: Iwona is a part-time sysadmin for PDSF. The other NERSC consultants do not perform system administrations tasks on the PDSF. NERSC will work to improve the PDSF response time for such issues.

Unhappy:   3 responses

somewhat improve on the C++ knowledge

NERSC response: We recognize the need for more C++ expertise and expect that newly hired consultants will be knowledgeable in C++.

As a followup to my last time, I still have not got a serious answer to the problems. The consultants waited to so long I gave up working on Jacquard for a while. Then they said everything was updated and changed so I should try to solve my problem again and see if it persists. Well, when I have some free time, I'll give it a go, but it seems that if I run into a problem, I might be on my own anyways.

I had bad luck with fortran compilers on Jacquard. I use OpenMP+MPI parallelization and the compilers were not able to handle OMP directives. It is not clear why more robust pg compilers were not used for this linux computer.

NERSC response: For the above two comments: Vendor support of the user environment and software on jacquard is not as tightly integrated as the support for Seaborg and Bassi and resolutions of these issues has taken longer. However, the consultants could have done a better job of at least letting the users know that we have not forgotten the issues, and our goal is to do better in this area.