How to contact HPCF

Overview

• • Account Requests: To request an account on the HPCF, fill out the Account Request Form (under Forms, above). If you are not logged into your UMBC account you will be asked to do so. 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. The accounts are set up under the faculty sponsor, and all storage is viewable to the sponsor. Currently two clusters exist, taki for CPU workloads and ada for GPU workloads. They have slightly different account request forms. Please fill out the right one or of course both.
  • 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 (under Forms, above). 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.
  • Training and 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 Roy Prouty, see below. Contact Roy for all inquiries on HPCF, its clusters, machine hardware, 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

Roy Prouty
HPCF System Administrator
DoIT
Office: ENGR 201c
Phone: (443)617-5771
E-mail: roy.prouty@umbc.edu

Governance Committee

The HPCF is a community-based and user-driven facility that is administered and maintained by DoIT under advisement of the Shared Infrastructure Governance (SIG) committee was established jointly by The Office of Research and Creative Achievement (ORCA) and The Division of Information Technology (DoIT) following recommendations by the Research Computing Taskforce in 2023. The SIG committee meets monthly to deliberate on policies and issues facing the HPCF user community and works to recommend best practices for the administration and growth of the UMBC HPCF. Currently, it is composed of two representatives from each college as well as, ex-officio, Vice President for Research & Creative Achievement and Vice President of Information Technology.

CAHSS

Alan Yeakley

COEIT

Karuna Joshi (IS)

Marc Olano (CSEE)

CNMS

Matt Pelton (Physics)

Zhibo Zhang (Physics)

The former governance structure which ran from roughly 2008-2023 was headed by Dr. Matthias Gobbert (Mathematics and Statistics) as well as the following faculty. The UMBC HPCF is endebited to these members who were instrumental in making high-performance computing what it is today at UMBC.

• Joseph W. Bennett (Chemistry and Biochemistry)
• Don Engel (CSEE, CSST, ORCA)
• Frank Ferraro (CSEE)
• Daniel Lobo (Biological Sciences)
• Larrabee Strow (Physics)
• Jianwu Wang (Information Systems)
• Meilin Yu (Mechanical Engineering)
• Zhibo Zhang (Physics)
• Ruben Delgado (Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology)
• Curtis R. Menyuk (CSEE)
• Marc Olano (CSEE)
• Lynn Sparling (Physics)
• Ian Thorpe (Chemistry and Biochemistry)
• Claire Welty (Chemical, Biochemical & Environmental Engineering and CUERE)

Graduate Research Assistants

The DoIT Research Computing Group is assisted by graduate research assistants (HPCF RAs) and a team of undergraduate student workers. Positions may be available! If interested inquire with Roy Prouty 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.