RCIF at WashU

Training and Workshops

Check events for our current schedule.

Support

For a guide to using the CHPC, see Slurm basics, and we have a short guide to debugging your scripts in our debugging fundamentals page.

You also have several ways of contacting us for one-on-one or crowd-sourced support.

• This documentation is a great resource for up-to-date information.
• Join our “Research Computing and Informatics Facility” workspace (mir-rcif) - email support for an invitation. This is an engaged and helpful community; feel free to post your questions to the community, or you can ask us for help directly on the #ask-an-admin channel.
• Receive news and advisories on the CHPC Users email group; all new users are added when they receive an account on the CHPC.
• On campus? You can find us in Suite 2211 or Suite 3338A of the East Building.
• Email support for the various services, including CHPC (chpc at nrg.wustl.edu), CNDA (cnda-help at wustl.edu), and MIRRIR (mirrir-help at wustl.edu).
• Check out our YouTube channel for additional content, including videos from user meetings and RCIF Open House events.

Scope of Support

We provide a wide range of support including but not limited to:

• Data Support: Access to RCIF shared datasets , data migration with Globus, or hpc-hardware-based data storage.
• Connection Support: Access to login nodes and computation nodes, including access via VNC, VSCode ,etc.
• Job Support: CHPC supports a variety of job submission methods, see Slurm Documentation. We will provide support for issues encountered during job submission and job running.
• Hardware and Software Support: We will provide regular updates and maintenance to the computational resources and software support.

  Out of scope support

  However, it is noteworthy that certain services will be considered out-of-scope and charged according to the preset rates. See Accounting FAQ:

  1. External software or packages: For instance, issues with jobs submitted with parsl will count as out-of-scope if the problems are caused by parsl code.
  2. Issues with personal devices: Contact WUIT for issues specific to your personal device (e.g. software, conda environment, or running code locally on personal device).
  3. Specific coding issues: We won’t be able to support specific coding problems, but CHPC provides software development support as individually-priced, external support. See the rate sheet above for details.

     Slack Channel Best Practices

Prior to posting

When posting messages to the #ask-an-admin channel, we suggest the following before posting

1. Search for relevant questions, as in many cases questions regarding a specific node or software package could have been reported by other users
2. Check CHPC documentation for potential quick fixes to issues

Posting formats

We suggest the following formatting guidelines to follow:

1. Submit error logs, scripts, and other text-based messages in code blocks:

2. Explicitly state the node, software, and environment (if applicable) where the issue has occurred.

Notes

Unless you have a solid reason to believe the scheduler is malfunctioning, please do not post about jobs not being scheduled. You may contact the admins if you consider the current partition insufficient.

Additional Resources

The Becker Library provides a series of trainings/workshops on computer basics for users who had no prior experience of Linux OS and high performance computing (Computing 101) as well as basic programming in Python, R, and MATLAB.

More detailed information can be found at https://becker.wustl.edu/services/research-computing.