Survey informs OSC staff of client needs, perceptions
Clients of the Ohio Supercomputer Center recently shared their needs and perceptions through an online survey conducted in late Spring 2019.
Managed by staff members of the HPC Client Services section, the survey garnered responses from 182 individuals. While the bulk of responses were from users within Ohio, they received input from people in cities as diverse as Roanoke, Va.; Topeka, Kans.; Los Angeles; New York; Gainesville, Fla.; Detroit; Philadelphia; Denver; Juarez, Mexico; Parma, Italy; and Leipzig, Germany.
“As we make decisions regarding system architecture, software availability, portal design and many other aspects of our services, it’s essential that we know what our clients think and feel about these topics,” said Brian Guilfoos, HPC client services manager at OSC. “This input will help us to better consider user needs for many tasks, including creating better documentation and messaging around services, and developing clearer descriptions within our service catalog.”
After tabulation of the results, the staff members outlined these key takeaways:
- Most clients primarily want access to more nodes, followed by a data archive.
- Many clients indicated education and software development weren’t as valuable to them as other services.
- There isn't much preventing most clients from freely moving from cluster to cluster
- Cost and available resources are primary issues preventing more usage by most clients.
- Processor speed and shared storage are the most critical system design issues for most clients.
“Users rated all parameters of our compute services important, but CPU speed and available memory were both rated the most important and with the smallest deviation,” said Guilfoos. “User work is most sensitive to the amount of available resources and the software environment. Cost is the item with the largest variance.”
“Software availability is the number one item impacting the ability to move between clusters, but in general users find moving between clusters easy, and the relative weighting of the items impacting the difficulty varies,” he said. “Cluster computing and research data storage are the services clients are most interested in, followed closely by OSC Help.”
“For new and expanded services, users want more compute capacity over any additional services,” Guilfoos reported. “A research data archive service is of high interest, but with significant variation, suggesting that for users who need this service, the interest is very high. Similarly, a protected data environment is of very high interest to the subset of users who are interested in it. However, all mentioned expansions of services are of interest to users.”
Moving forward, Guilfoos expects that general client surveys will be a regular feature of planning activities at the center. He also believes that occasional surveys on narrower, more specific topics might be conducted to augment the general survey on timely topics of interest.
