Out of 2000+ active users on the cluster, 195 users participated in this survey. The survey covered demographics, cluster use, storage, support, training and documentation.
If you would like to provide additional feedback, please use the following link: User Survey Comments
User Demographics:
The distribution of respondents was:
- Graduate Students (30%)
- Research Staff (16%)
- Faculty and PIs (19%)
- Postdocs (15%)
- Research Fellows (5.5%)
- Undergrads (2.5%)
- Other/Various (totaling 12%).
Response Summaries:
Cluster Usage:
Key findings from Computing questions:
- 70% of the users are using command line access where 30% use Open OnDemand service (Interactive Browser)
- 62 users are interested in more Nvidia GPUs and 42 users requested for High memory nodes (2TB+).
- These is interest in ARM, AMD and AMD GPU chipsets
- Users ranked highly on meeting computational needs, ease of use, and support of their current software and workflows while 18 (15%) expressed reliability concerns.
- The most used languages or programs are Python3, R, and Bash.
- Popular AI/ML tools are Pytorch, Tensorflow and OpenAI
Storage:
Key findings from Storage questions:
- Users use Global Scratch to run their workflows for better performance.
- Users ranked highly on meeting needs, ease of use, and support of their current workflows while 15(13%) expressed reliability concerns.
- 26% have a external backups for their data, 26% maintain a backup on FASRC storage while 13% does not have data backups
- 29% is interested in having a disaster backup for our Tier 0 storage
Support and Documentation:
Key finding from support and documentation questions:
- Support is responsive, helpful, intelligible, thorough and easy to work with.
- 50% of surveyee never attended office hours, 25% attended only once and 25% multiple times
- There are mixed feelings about the documentation, with some users finding it complete and useful, while others find it overwhelming or lacking in certain areas.
- We got good feedback on documents to add and improve
Training:
- Training sessions are seen as thorough and instructive
- There's a demand for more topics to be covered.
Recommendations:
- To keep status page up to date and reliable information
- Reliability concerns related to Globus Scratch storage
- Need for more user-friendly and up-to-date documentation
- Training offerings to cover more topics