TGQR 2010Q4 Report.pdf - Teragridforum.org

5.3.3
Trouble Ticket Statistics
Table 5.2 shows how long tickets remained open during this quarter, that is, how long it took for
TeraGrid user support staff to provide a diagnostic, workaround or solution.
Table 5.2. Number of Q4, 2010 tickets that remained “open” for the indicated time bins.
Open for 1 hour, 1 day, 2 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks 140
5.4 RP Operations: User Services
5.4.1
Consulting Services
Ongoing daily operational user support was conducted at the RPs. Consulting is the second tier of
TG’s three-tier user support, with the first tier being the TG Operations Center and the third tier
being the TG Advanced User Support. TG RP Consulting staff provide real-time, frontline
support for their local RP’s resources in response to users’ requests to the TeraGrid Operations
Center and RP consulting systems. This support includes assistance such as allocations issues,
initial login issues for new users, debugging jobs, data transfer, and compiler support. Consulting
support typically engages a user for a relatively short period of time, and may pass a user on to
Advanced Support if longer-term assistance is required. Some examples of site-specific assistance
achievements and their impact on users’ research progress follow.
PSC has operated a friendly user program for community participation in successive stages of
building up Blacklight, its very large shared memory SGI Altix UV system scheduled to enter
TeraGrid production in January 2011. The PSC consulting staff has worked with 31 friendly user
groups, with a focus both on ensuring good performance for existing applications, and on
fostering novel and innovative research projects that depend on the unique capabilities of
Blacklight. Examples of the latter include: assembling the Rhesus macaque genome; assembling
the Sorghum genome and other projects related to the iPlant Collaborative; model fitting and
optimization for machine translation and semantic parsing; and network analysis. Special effort
has been devoted to programming environments that have not been traditionally supported on
supercomputing systems, such as Java, Python and R, as well as to the deployment of UPC and of
code performance analysis tools.
In support of Jacobo Bielak (Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University),
John Urbanic (PSC) developed analysis procedures using MATLAB to quantify differences
produced by different algorithms and their implementations, for example between 64-bit and 32-
bit floating-point versions, in the Hercules seismology code. Urbanic is now completing the
production version of the single/double precision selectable code, along with updating the rupture
code and addressing coordinate transforms that other groups are using.
There are a number of ongoing support efforts by the Purdue RP staff to help current and
potential TG users. They worked with Brian Henry (potential TeraGrid user – University of
Illinois - Chicago) to investigate which system to use for access to Fluent as well as if it would be
possible to run his Delphi code on a Windows environment via the Condor Pool. They assisted
Charles Moseley, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, looking into how to run specific
software on the Condor Pool under Linux instead of the initial request of running on Windows;
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