How to contact HPCF

Overview

• • Account Requests: To request an account on our computing cluster, fill out the Account Request Form. The machines in HPCF are open to the UMBC community, but since they are for research purposes, an account application by students needs to be sponsored by a faculty member. This means that initially both faculty and student need to submit account requests to create a PI group; to add a student to an existing PI group, only a request from the new student is needed. All accounts are subject to approval by the governance committee. The accounts are set up under the faculty sponsor, and all storage is viewable to the sponsor.
  • Help Requests – All help requests/issues should be reported through the DoIT (UMBC Division of Information Technology) Research computing RT ticket system. To do this, please fill out the HPCF Help Request form. If you are not logged into your UMBC account you will be asked to do so. This is for all questions that relate to system administration, but also all questions on how to use the systems and this website. This includes requests for installation of software, reporting any unexpected behavior of the system, issues with user behavior, and anything else that warrants attention. This list is monitored both by the system administrators from DoIT, by the chair of the governance committee, and the HPCF RAs for user support (see below). By reporting issues in this way, you can take advantage of receiving both system admin attention and user support help, depending on which is more suitable, without the user having to decide what type of problem it is. Account Request and Help Request forms are both available under the Forms tab.
  • Consulting Support As part of the user support for the machines in the HPCF, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Consulting (CIRC) in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics coordinates more individualized user support. If you are interested in this, please visit circ.umbc.edu and fill out a Service Request Form under the Services Available tab mentioning the keyword “HPCF”.
  • HPCF Point of Contact The point of contact for the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) is the chair of the governance committee, Dr. Matthias K. Gobbert, see below. Contact him for all inquiries on HPCF, its machines, general questions, to submit publications, to inquire about joining the financing of the machine, for feedback and suggestions, and all other questions.

Point of Contact

The chair of the governance committee serves as point of contact for HPCF:
Matthias K. Gobbert
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Office: Math/Psyc 416
Phone: (410) 455-2404
E-mail: gobbert@umbc.edu
Web: http://www.umbc.edu/~gobbert

The 2018 and 2021 portions of taki with Dr. Gobbert and HPCF RAs Garima Kumari and Charan Duggirala.

Governance Committee

HPCF is a community-based, user-driven facility. This is reflected in its governance structure. Ordinarily, the chair of the governance committee serves as point of contact for HPCF (see above), but you are welcome to contact other members of the committee if necessary. The governance committee was established to help the user community develop and decide usage rules for HPCF. Its members at present are:

• Joseph W. Bennett (Chemistry and Biochemistry)
• Don Engel (Office of the Vice President for Research & DoIT)
• Frank Ferraro (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering)
• Matthias K. Gobbert (Mathematics and Statistics, Chair)
• Daniel Lobo (Biological Sciences)
• Larrabee Strow (Physics)
• Jianwu Wang (Information Systems)
• Meilin Yu (Mechanical Engineering)
• Zhibo Zhang (Physics)

We thank former members of the governance committee for their invaluable help in past years:

• Ruben Delgado (Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology)
• Curtis R. Menyuk (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering)
• Marc Olano (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering)
• Lynn Sparling (Physics)
• Ian Thorpe (Chemistry and Biochemistry)
• Claire Welty (Chemical, Biochemical & Environmental Engineering and CUERE)

Graduate Research Assistants

The point of contact and chair of the governance committee is assisted by graduate research assistants (HPCF RAs). Positions may be available! If interested inquire with Dr. Matthias Gobbert at the contact information above. The RAs are available to provide user support and help with research on the computing cluster. To request support, please fill out the HPCF Help Request form; do not contact the RAs directly.