Expert Teams

World-Class Expertise and Project Lifecycle Assistance

To maximize your research, the ALCF has assembled a team of world-class experts in leadership computing to provide full project lifecycle assistance and support.

 

User Services and Outreach

The USO team provides frontline services and support to existing and potential ALCF users. The team also provides marketing and outreach to users, DOE and the broader community.

The USO provides the following services:

  • Account/project administration
  • User training and education
  • Help Desk
  • User outreach
  • Facility tours
  • Public relations and media coordination
  • Displays, education materials

Catalysts

The Catalyst Team provides key projects with an assigned expert to maximize and accelerate their research.

Features include:

  • Full project lifecycle assistance
  • Support in conjunction with ALCF hardware and software resources
  • Tailored services for unique requirements of a given research initiative

The Catalyst Team:

  • Provides a "jump-start" in the use of ALCF resources
  • Aligns the availability of ALCF resources with the needs of the project team
  • Establishes a spirit of collaboration to maximize the value that ALCF can bring to our project partners

Performance Engineering

The mission of the Performance Engineering group is to ensure the effective use of applications on ALCF systems and emerging systems by assessing and improving the algorithms used by the applications and techniques used to implement those algorithms. This team's efforts are driven by the needs of the applications.

ALCF Performance Engineers have extensive expertise and are involved in:

  • Application Scaling and single core optimizations
  • Performance modeling and projections
  • Performance tools and libraries collaborations
  • Performance benchmarks development
  • Parallel I/O optimizations
  • Computer architectures
  • Standard organizations in programming languages and programming models

Data Analytics and Visualization Team 

The Data Analytics and Visualization team has expertise in tools and methods for high-performance post processing of large datasets, interactive data exploration, batch visualization, and production visualization. 

Team members help users with their visualization and analysis needs using ALCF high-performance resources and a suite of tools maintained for these purposes. 

  • Production tools for high performance visualization (ParaView, VisIt) 
  • Analysis tools (R, MATLAB) 
  • Presentation graphics (PowerPoint, Keynote, Final Cut Pro) 

The ALCF Data Analytics and Visualization team has strong connections to Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science research and development in the area of visualization and analysis.

Operations

The Systems Group is responsible for:

  • hardware maintenance
  • software maintenance 
  • resolution of user tickets related to system issues 
  • responding to requests for new software or versions of software 
  • developing systems tools, particularly ones related to the unique system architectures and scale of ALCF resources.

The Advanced Integration Group is responsible for:

  • ensuring the entire system software stack works together 
  • assisting with I/O performance issues 
  • bug fixes and feature requests for systems software 
  • responding to requests for new software or versions of software 
  • clusterbank job accounting system 
  • PVFS file system 
  • Darshan I/O monitoring library
  • internal and external report generation 
  • exploring new hardware and software technologies for our next generation systems