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Getting help on the HPC clusters

  1. Overview of getting help on HPC clusters
  2. Information to include/tips for submitting tickets
    1. Using the script command to record actions
  3. Opening a help ticket
  4. Workshops

Overview of getting help on the HPC clusters

We are constantly trying to improve our documentation on the clusters, and we ask that for basic questions on usage and how to do things that you look at that first. We are developing a FAQ and we have general usage documentation. Kindly read this before asking questions via help tickets.

While the HPC systems staff will try to assist you on just about any question, we are generally not very familiar with the various applications used in your research, and therefore cannot always provide much useful assistance. Often such questions are best directed at your colleagues. The Division of Information Technology is trying to find ways to facilitate such collaboration (suggestions are welcome).

Of course, not all questions are covered (or covered clearly) in the documentation, and in these cases you should open a help ticket.

And unfortunately, sometimes there are real hardware, software, or other problems with the system. While we are sometimes aware of these issues from our own monitoring, HPCCs are by their nature complicated beasts, and some issues are not easily detected from monitoring. So if you encounter an issue that you believe to be of a system nature, please open a help ticket.

Information to include/tips for submitting tickets

To help us serve you better, when you submit a help ticket, please:

Using the script command to record actions

Sometimes when diagnosing an issue, we will ask you to show us exactly what commands you issued and what they returned. Or, you need to show us a long complicated error message. An useful tool in these cases is the script command; once you issue it, it will start a new shell and log all of your input to and all the output from the new shell. This is not that useful for programs that run in a graphical environment, but provides a fairly good log for command line processes.

For example, in the following, we log the session to the file help.script in my home directory: 


login-1:~: script help.script
Script started, file is help.script
login-1:~: date
Tue Oct 21 10:41:07 EDT 2014
login-1:~:  module list
Currently Loaded Modulefiles:
  1) dept/Glue
login-1:~:  ncap2
ncap2: Command not found.
login-1:~: exit
exit
Script done, file is help.script
login-1:~:
login-1:~:
login-1:~: cat help.script
Script started, file is help.script
login-1:~: date
Tue Oct 21 10:41:07 EDT 2014
login-1:~:  module list
Currently Loaded Modulefiles:
  1) dept/Glue
login-1:~:  ncap2
ncap2: Command not found.
login-1:~: exit
exit

Script done on Tue Oct 21 10:42:51 2014
login-1:~:

NOTE: Always remember to exit the shell started by the script command. And, as in the above example, it can be useful to print the contents of the file (e.g. with the cat command) to verify things were properly recorded.

Submitting a help ticket

There are several ways to actually submit the ticket to the UMD Division of Information Technology:

NOTE: The Division of Information Technology at the University of Maryland does NOT maintain the MARCC/Bluecrab HPC cluster. While you are welcome to submit a ticket to the Division of Information Technology for support with issues on the Bluecrab cluster, and we will try to assist you, many matters will require or be more readily solved by contacting the MARCC support staff. Again, please provide a reasonable subject line. If you decide to contact both support staffs on the same issue, kindly:






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