Support

Support for the ALICE HPC system is provided by the Research Computing Support (RCS team).

Documentation

In adddition to these pages, there is some general documentation covering Research Computing Systems on the RCS sharepoint site.

Support Requests.

Support requests can be sent to the rcs.support@le.ac.uk email address or be submitted via the help portal ithelp.le.ac.uk. Please read the information below before submitting a support request.

Do not bundle more than one support issue into a request - different issues may be dealt with by different people or even different teams. If this is the case then the the second (and third, fourth etc) issue may not be looked at until the first has been dealt with. Raise a separate ticket for each issue, eg a software install request and a problem with accessing a directory or file should be two separate requests.

Use ithelp.le.ac.uk to request a new member of an HPC project if you are the PI (Principal Investigator). If you are not the PI, ask the PI to submit the request.

When submitting a support request please state that the request is for the ALICE HPC system in the subject or prominently early in the request - this makes it easier for the help desk to direct your request to the correct team.

Important

Before raising a Support Request, please check the Frequently Asked Questions and use the 'Search' function for this documentation.

Raising a support request

Please include the full commmand(s) you are trying to execute. e.g.:

cp -R /scratch/project/abc1/test001_output/result.txt /home/a/abc1/data/results

ls ~/folder395/

cd $SCRATCHDIR/Experiment
./analysis.sh MyData.txt

module load gizmo/1.2
export GIZMO_LEVEL="optimize"
gizmo-run ~/smalldata/calibrations.1

Providing the commands is more important than any error message(s) seen, but you can let us know about these too. Include the full path to and name of the file eg:

/scratch/project/abc123/processing/run12345.err

Important

In general, error messages are useful only alongside the command which has produced them. Please make sure you provide the information detailed above.

Important

Please do not attach files to your request - just provide information about where they can be seen on ALICE as detailed above.

Job scheduler issues

If the problem is with submitting a job to the scheduler or problems with the job after it is running then the information supplied should include:

  • Full path to job submission script (eg /home/a/abc1/jobscripts/project1/AnalysisRun_123.slurm) or

  • The command you used to submit it if you did not use a submission script, eg: srun --partition=devel --account=test --partition=devel --x11 --cpus-per-task=4 --time=2:0:0 --mem=4g --pty /bin/bash

  • The job number (if you have managed to succesfully submit it)

Training Courses.

The Research Computing Support and Research Software Engineering team provide a number of courses, these can be viewed on the RCS sharepoint site.