Allocations and Policies

Allocations of computer time and archival storage at NERSC are awarded to research groups, regardless of their source of funding, based on an annual review of proposals. As proposals are submitted, they are subjected to peer review to evaluate the quality of science, how well the proposed research is aligned with the mission of DOE SC, the need for computing resources, and the readiness of the specific application and applicant to fully utilize the computing resources being requested.

The DOE initiated a new allocations process for FY 2003 in which DOE’s Supercomputing Allocations Committee (SAC, see Appendix D) reviews and makes award decisions for all production requests, reflecting their mission priorities. In addition, most proposals are reviewed by the Computational Review Panel (CORP, Appendix B) to assess the computational approach, optimization, scalability, and communications characteristics of the applicant’s code. Allocations for small startup projects are determined by NERSC.

Two other groups provide general oversight for the NERSC Center: the NERSC Policy Board (Appendix A) advises the Berkeley Lab Director on the policies that determine the impact and performance of the NERSC Center, and the NERSC Users Group (Appendix C) advises the NERSC management and provides feedback from the user community. DOE program management is provided by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (Appendix E), with advice from the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (Appendix F).

User Survey Results

Three hundred users responded to this year’s NERSC User Survey, the highest response level in the survey’s five-year history. The survey responses provide feedback about every aspect of NERSC’s operation, help us judge the quality of our services, give DOE information on how well NERSC is doing, and point us to areas we can improve.

The average score for overall satisfaction with NERSC in 2002 was 6.32 on a scale of 1 to 7. Areas with the highest user satisfaction were IBM SP uptime (6.56), timely consulting response (6.51), HPSS reliability (6.51), and PDSF uptime (6.51). Areas with the lowest user satisfaction were training (4.99), visualization services (4.83), and PVP batch wait time (4.77). Complete survey results can be found at http://www.nersc.gov/news/survey/2002/.

Every year NERSC institutes changes based on the survey. This past year’s efforts include:

• With the NERSC User Group we established a queue committee whose task was to investigate queue issues and recommend improvements.
• NERSC provided more performance analysis tools on the IBM SP along with documentation and training on how to use them.
• NERSC installed new visualization tools on the IBM SP and the visualization server, and streamlined visualization documentation.
• NERSC wrote a number of scripts to improve IBM SP management procedures.
  NERSC started to conduct monthly training sessions on the Internet using Access Grid Node technology. This technology is still not completely mature, and there have been a few rough spots along the way. We will continue working to improve our training program.